Pro­gram­mer and Pixar co-founder Ed Cat­mull leads by empow­er­ing oth­ers to achieve. In a recent Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cle, he describes the archi­tec­ture of Pixar’s Suc­cess: a com­mu­nity where peo­ple at all lev­els sup­port one another.

A movie con­tains lit­er­ally tens of thou­sands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sen­tence; in the per­for­mance of each line; in the design of char­ac­ters, sets, and back­grounds; in the loca­tions of the cam­era; in the col­ors, the light­ing, the pac­ing. The direc­tor and the other cre­ative lead­ers of a pro­duc­tion do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every sin­gle mem­ber of the 200– to 250-person pro­duc­tion group makes sug­ges­tions. Cre­ativ­ity must be present at every level of every artis­tic and tech­ni­cal part of the orga­ni­za­tion. The lead­ers sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coher­ent whole—that sup­port the story—which is a very dif­fi­cult task. It’s like an archae­o­log­i­cal dig where you don’t know what you’re look­ing for or whether you will even find any­thing. The process is down­right scary.

Sounds like a damn good way to run a company.