Books – Page 123 – artdiamondblog.com

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(p. 142) The consumer products arm of Disney–the group responsible for licensing toys and other tie-ins–was also slow to see the potential of Toy Story. It was a case of out of sight, out of mind: Toy Story was in production hundreds of miles away. Preoccupied with two other forthcoming releases, Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney Consumer Products left the Pixar film on the back burner. When Guggenheim met with one of the division’s senior licensing executives in December 1994, he was alarmed to discover that she saw no licensing potential in the film.
“We put together a presentation reel of scenes from the film that we’d already completed, and material on how the film was being made” Guggenheim said. “We were taking that around the company so people could get a feeling of what this film was all about.”
The executive told him, I don’t know how we’re going to do toys for this.
“What do you mean?” Guggenheim queried. “It’s Toy Story. You know, Toy . . . Story.”
Yes, she said, but you have all these toys that already exist–Mr. Potato Head, Speak & Spell, all that stuff. How are we ever going to make money off that?
“But you have all these original characters. You’ve got Buzz, you’ve got Woody.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis and italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Myhrvold Left Work with Hawking for the Excitement of Entrepreneurship

(p. 139) Microsoft was represented ¡n the discussion by its senior vice president for advanced technology, a thirty-five-year-old Nathan Myhrvold. After finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton at age twenty-three, Myhrvold had worked for a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the physicist Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, tackling theories of (p. 140) gravitation and curved space-time, before taking a three-month leave of absence to help some friends in the Bay Area with a software project. He became caught up in the excitement of personal computer software and entrepreneurship and never went back. In Berkeley, he co-founded a company called Dynamical Systems to develop operating system for personal computers, which struggled for two years until Microsoft bought it in 1986. At Microsoft, he persuaded Bill Gates to let him establish a corporate research center, Microsoft Research, with Myhrvold himself in charge.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

James Morrison Was a “Retailing Genius”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Morrison was not an inventor-capitalist but a retailing genius, more Sam Walton than Steve Jobs. He catered to England’s growing consumer class by diversifying his wares and, in his ever-growing network of shops, introducing luxurious showrooms. He was a disciple of volume, seeking “high turnover, small profits, and quick returns.” He sent his traveling men not to find buyers, as was typical, but to find the best suppliers. Advantageously purchased in bulk, goods would sell themselves. Morrison’s buyers were specialists, anticipating the practices of later department stores. He kept his finger on the pulse of fashion and on “market making” events. Legendarily, he was never caught short of black crepe when a member of the royal family was ill. “The Duke of York has died most conveniently,” he once quipped while tallying profits.
The “Napoleon of shopkeepers” went on to found his own merchant bank and accumulate a prodigious investment portfolio, much of it in American bonds. Strategic lending to broke aristocrats greased Morrison’s way into Parliament, where he served as a “radical Whig,” championing political reform and free trade.
. . .
. . . Morrison conducted both his retailing and his banking business with impeccable transparency. The investments he sold were honestly structured, and the risks he ran were his own, backed by sufficient collateral. Morrison’s was an era before bailouts, an era of some moral luck but little moral hazard. Markets rose and fell with reasonably predictable effects. For him and many of his contemporaries, credit remained a personal matter of the highest consequence. In this, alas, a character such as Morrison now seems more alien than familiar.

For the full review, see:

JEFFREY COLLINS. “BOOKSHELF; King of the Shopkeepers; The lessons of a merchant prince and a brilliant retailer whose wool, linen, silk, thread and lace flew off the shelves.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Dakers, Caroline. A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Lasseter’s Success Came from Seeing How the Details Affected the Storytelling

(p. 138) “I had no reason to think it would be any good,” recalled Barzel, who was then a recently minted California Institute of Technology Ph.D. on the lighting team. “I knew John was absolutely brilliant as a animator of shorts. But I’ve read authors who write good short stories and crummy novels; I figured it’s a different skill. I had no reason to think John would have the skill to pull off a full-length movie.”
He expected something that animators and animation buffs might find interesting, but that probably would not have a particularly wide audience.
“I joined because I wanted the practical experience,” he said, “I thought, Well, it’s going to be the first full-length [computer-animated] movie, so it’ll be a fun thing to have been associated with, however it turns out.”
What finally made Barzel a believer was watching Lasseter at work. He found that Lasseter had an uncanny ability to shift between the macro level of the entire film and the micro level of whatever detail he was dealing with at the moment. “Looking at an individual frame — it’s meticulous work– he would always be aware of its role in the larger context of storytelling,” Barzel recalled. “He’d say something like, ‘This is the first time this character responds to that situation; it’s really important that he get the right glint in his eye.’ ” Barzel started to think, John knows what he’s doing. This movie could be really good.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Lean Start-Ups “Ruthlessly Cull Failures”

Eric Ries and his book. Source of photo: http://nemonics.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/eric-ries-lean-startup.jpg?w=584&h=262

(p. D3) “What’s different in the Valley is that we’ve found a quasi-scientific method for reinventing businesses and industries, not just products,” said Randy Komisar, a partner in a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “The approach is much more systematic than it was several years ago.”

The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly.
The preferred formula today is often called the “lean start-up.” Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford.
The approach emphasizes quickly developing “minimum viable products,” low-cost versions that are shown to customers for reaction, and then improved. Flexibility is the other hallmark. Test business models and ideas, and ruthlessly cull failures and move on to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and so on — “pivoting,” as the process is known.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Looking Backward to Put New Technologies in Focus.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D3 & D4.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 5, 2011.)

Ries’ recent book is:
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

Blank’s books are:
Blank, Steve. Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost. CafePress.com, 2010.
Blank, Steven Gary. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win. 2nd ed: CafePress.com, 2005.
Blank, Steve, and Bob Dorf. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. K & S Ranch, 2012.

Another relevant book is:
Maurya, Ash. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012.

“Being Able to Work on a Great Project”

(p. 133) Recruiting was brisk; the magnet for talent was not the pay, generally mediocre, but rather the allure of taking part in the first fully computer-animated feature film. “Disney gave us a very modest budget [$17.5 million] for Toy Story,” Guggenheim said. “Although that budget went up progressively over time, it didn’t afford for very high salaries, unfortunately. We tried to make the other working conditions better. Just the enthusiasm of being able to work on a great project is as often as not what attracts artists and animators.”

Faraday and Einstein Were Visual and Physical Thinkers, Not Mathematicians

Source of book image: http://www.rsc.org/images/Faraday_Chemical_History-of-a-Candle_180_tcm18-210390.jpg

(p. C6) Michael Faraday is one of the most beguiling and lovable figures in the history of science. Though he could not understand a single equation, he deduced the essential structure of the laws of electromagnetism through visualization and physical intuition. (James Clerk Maxwell would later give them mathematical form.) Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday over his desk, for Einstein also thought of himself primarily as a visual and physical thinker, not an abstract mathematician.
. . .
Faraday’s text is still charming and rich, a judgment that few popular works on science could sustain after so many years. Though he addresses himself to an “auditory of juveniles,” he calls for his audience to follow a close chain of reasoning presented through a series of experiments and deductions.
. . .
. . . : “In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle,” as Faraday illustrates in his experiments.
In his closing, he turns from our metabolic resemblance to a candle to his deeper wish that “you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you.”

For the full review, see:
PETER PESIC. “BOOKSHELF; Keeper of the Flame.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 7, 2012): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book under review:
Faraday, Michael. The Chemical History of a Candle. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2011.

In History, Documenting Your Sources Matters More than Your Credentials

George Dyson. Source of photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. D11) BELLINGHAM, Wash. — More than most of us, the science historian George Dyson spends his days thinking about technologies, old and very new.
. . .
Though this 58-year-old author’s works are centered on technology, they often have an autobiographical subtext. Freeman Dyson, the physicist and mathematician who was a protagonist of Project Orion, is his father. Esther Dyson, the Internet philosopher and high-tech investor, is his sister. We spoke for three hours at his cottage here, and later by telephone. A condensed and edited version of the conversations follows.
. . .
. . . today you make your living as a historian of science and technology. How does a high school dropout get to do that?
Hey, this is America. You can do what you want! I love this idea that someone who didn’t finish high school can write books that get taken seriously. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it’s what you write, not what your credentials are.

For the full interview, see:
CLAUDIA DREIFUS, interviewer. “Looking Backward to Put New Technologies in Focus.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D11.
(Note: question bolded in original; ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated December 5, 2011.)

Dyson’s most recent book is:
Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.

“No Street Protester Has Yet Endowed a University Department”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Over the next three decades, Breasted would excavate a series of sites in Egypt, the Sudan and the Near East. He would also develop an important ability to identify rich and influential benefactors and to gain their confidence without resorting to sycophancy. . . . Notable among the Maecenas figures he cultivated was John D. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller had been an early patron of the University of Chicago; he might have done something for Near Eastern studies in any case, but it is clear that without Breasted’s energy and enthusiasm, Rockefeller’s scholarly philanthropy would never have taken the course it did. Eventually, he provided the funding for an entire Oriental Institute in 1931. (The OI, as it is affectionately known, had existed from 1919 but essentially as a concept between academic committees.) Together with its Egyptian offshoot, Chicago House, the OI is perhaps the leading center of Egyptology and Assyriology in the world. At the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are hearing a lot about the evils of bankers and capitalism, but as far as I know no street protester has yet endowed a university department.

For the full review, see:
JOHN RAY. “BOOKSHELF; From Illinois To Mesopotamia; Excavating sites in Egypt and the Near East, writing groundbreaking books and developing a talent for courting wealthy donors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 23, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book under review:
Abt, Jeffrey. American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Lasseter’s Epiphany: “This Is What Walt Was Waiting For”

(p. 52) In a trailer on the Disney lot, Lasseter huddled with Rees and Kroyer to look at the first computer-generated scene to come in–a race among drivers in virtual motorcycles known as light cycles. The scene had no character animation and its graphics were rudimentary, but it brought Lasseter an epiphany. The dimensionality of the scene was something he had never witnessed before. If this technology could be melded with Disney animation, he thought, he would have the makings of a revolution. Until then, three-dimensional effects in animation had required difficult, costly sessions with the multistory “multiplane” camera, practical for only a few key sequences in a film, if that. The computers could even move the audience’s point of view around a scene like a Steadicam. The possibilities seemed infinite.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said later. “Walt Disney, all his career, all his life, was striving to get more dimension in his (p. 53) animation . . . and I was standing there, looking at it, going, ‘This is what Walt was waiting for.'”
He was not able to interest the animation executives in it; they did not care to hear about new technology unless it made animation faster or cheaper.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

“The Astaires’ Defiant New World Optimism”

Source of book image:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513pEMI-LeL._.jpg

(p. C6) The Astaire universe was made of crazy joy, that guiltless worldview unique to the art of the American 1920s. The Astaires’ trademarked exit was the gleefully mischievous “runaround,” in which they trotted about the stage in ever increasing circles as if joined at the hip, expanding their geometry till they reached the wings and vanished. It was goofy and expert at once, a way of defining musical comedy as the state of being young, cute and in love with life.
. . .
“For all their jazz-fueled modernity,” Ms. Riley writes of the Astaires’ London réclame, they were “anti-modernist.” This pair was more than sunshine. The sheer zest with which they frisked through a show ran “counter to High Modernism’s pervasive sense of the instability of the self and the universe.” This was the time, Ms. Riley notes, of “The Waste Land,” “Ulysses,” “Vile Bodies.” Art was in despair. But the Astaires’ “defiant New World optimism” proved a remedy: meeting cute, assuming disguises and high-hatting the blues with fascinating rhythm. It’s a very American notion: that a strong foundation in popular art creates a positive worldview in general. Call it the audacity of charm.
. . .
They don’t make shows that way anymore, and Ms. Riley’s book is thus a resuscitation of a naive but perhaps more authentically native showbiz, an art of natural forces. “The Astaires” is a salute to an America at ease with itself and doing something wonderful in the song-and-dance line that seemed, for a time, like the hottest thing in the culture.

For the full review, see:
Kathleen Riley. “BOOKSHELF; Sibling Revelry.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 3, 2012): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Riley, Kathleen. The Astaires: Fred & Adele. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.