Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business
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Book of Mormon In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Bobby Lopez made clear that Kristen was a sounding board for him in writing Avenue Q and Book of Mormon but was not formally credited on those shows.
dozens of others popped up In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, a spokeswoman for Walt Disney Animation Studios wrote that the studio wished to emphasize “how typical this process is for every film at Disney Animation since John [Lasseter] and Ed [Catmull] have become our studio leaders—the screening process, the notes sessions, the taking apart of the film and putting it back together. This is typical, not atypical.”
“good ideas are suffocated” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Ed Catmull, president of Disney Animation, wrote that the various anecdotes in this chapter are “viewpoints of different snapshots in time as the film developed….In truth, you could substitute different words and it would pretty much describe how every film goes through searching and change. This is worth emphasizing so that people don’t have the impression that Frozen was different in that way.”
Frozen was winding down In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Millstein wrote: “Creativity needs time, space and support to fully explore multiple ideas simultaneously. Our creative leadership has to have the confidence and trust in each other to experiment, fail and try again and again until the answers to story questions and problems get better and more refined. There also needs to be a relentless focus on finding the best solutions to difficult and thorny problems and never settling for sub-optimum solutions because of time issues. Our creative teams need to trust that the executive management fundamentally believes in and supports this process.”
avant-garde on Broadway Amanda Vaill, Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York: Broadway Books, 2008); “Q&A with Producer Director Judy Kinberg, ‘Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About,’ ” directed by Judy Kinberg, American Masters, PBS, January 28, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/jerome-robbins-q-a-with-producerdirector-judy-kinberg/1100/; Sanjay Roy, “Step-by-Step Guide to Dance: Jerome Robbins,” The Guardian, July 7, 2009; Sarah Fishko, “The Real Life Drama Behind West Side Story,” NPR, January 7, 2009, http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/97274711/the-real-life-drama-behind-west-side-story; Jeff Lundun and Scott Simon, “Part One: Making a New Kind of Musical,” NPR, September 26, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14730899; Jeff Lundun and Scott Simon, “Part Two: Casting Calls and Out of Town Trials,” NPR, September 26, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14744266; Jeff Lundun and Scott Simon, “Part Three: Broadway to Hollywood—and Beyond,” NPR, September 26, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14749729; “West Side Story Film Still Pretty, and Witty, at 50,” NPR, October 17, 2011, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14749729; Jesse Green, “When You’re a Shark You’re a Shark All the Way,” New York Magazine, March 15, 2009; Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” American Music 10, no. 2 (1992): 136–69; Beth Genné, “ ‘Freedom Incarnate’: Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailors as an Icon of American Values in World War II,” Dance Chronicle 24, no. 1 (2001): 83–103; Bill Fischer and Andy Boynton, “Virtuoso Teams,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2005; Otis L. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song and Story: Playwrights/Lyricists/Composers Discuss Their Hits (New York: Dodd Mead, 1985); Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Robert Emmet Long, “West Side Story,” in Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors: 1940 to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2001); Leonard Bernstein, “A West Side Log” (1982); Terri Roberts, “West Side Story: ‘We Were All Very Young,’ ” The Sondheim Review 9, no. 3 (Winter 2003); Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway: A Critical Quotebook of the Golden Era of the Musical Theatre, Oklahoma! (1943) to Fiddler on the Roof (1964) (New York: Schirmer Trade Books, 1990); Amanda Vaill, “Jerome Robbins—About the Artist,” American Masters, PBS, January 27, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/jerome-robbins-about-the-artist/1099/.
actor on the stage There are a few outliers to this musical formula, most notably Oklahoma!, in which dance was used to express plot and emotional moments.
“me a ballet?” Tim Carter, “Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story. By Nigel Simeone,” Music and Letters 92, no. 3 (2011): 508–10.
would be West Side Story West Side Story went through numerous names before the final title was chosen.
musical’s main characters Excerpts of letters come from the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress as well as from records made available by various authors and the New York Public Library system.
“jitterbugging” This was written by Leonard Bernstein, as quoted in The Leonard Bernstein Letters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013).
“we’re boring the audience” Jerome Robbins, as quoted in The Leonard Bernstein Letters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013).
“two intermissions” Vaill, Somewhere.
“Shakespeare standing behind you” Ibid.
“Forget Anita” Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
Science in 2013 Brian Uzzi et al., “Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact,” Science 342, no. 25 (2013): 468–72.
Brian Uzzi and Ben Jones For more on Uzzi and Jones’s work, please see Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi, “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge,” Science 316, no. 5827 (2007): 1036–39; Benjamin F. Jones, Stefan Wuchty, and Brian Uzzi, “Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science,” Science 322, no. 5905 (2008): 1259–62; Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski et al., “Advancing the Science of Team Science,” Clinical and Translational Science 3, no. 5 (2010): 263–66; Ginger Zhe Jin et al., The Reverse Matthew Effect: Catastrophe and Consequence in Scientific Teams (working paper 19489, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013); Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, “Do Small Worlds Make Big Differences? Artist Networks and the Success of Broadway Musicals, 1945–1989” (unpublished manuscript, Evanston, Ill., 2003); Brian Uzzi, and Jarrett Spiro, “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 2 (2005): 447–504; Brian Uzzi, “A Social Network’s Changing Statistical Properties and the Quality of Human Innovation,” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical 41, no. 22 (2008); Brian Uzzi, Luis A.N. Amaral, and Felix Reed-Tsochas, “Small-World Networks and Management Science Research: A Review,” European Management Review 4, no. 2 (2007): 77–91.
creative and important In response to a fact-checking email, Uzzi wrote: “The other thing is that teams are more likely to get this sweet spot of creativity right. They are more likely than individuals to put together atypical combinations of prior sources. Also, a paper with the right mix of conventional and atypical ideas by a team does better than a single author, given the same mix of conventional and atypical ideas. This means teams are better than individuals at sourcing and deriving insights from atypical combinations.”
bought lottery tickets Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–32; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–91; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1124–31; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453–58; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Choices, Values, and Frames,” Americ
an Psychologist 39, no. 4 (1984): 341; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973): 237.
how genes evolve Qiong Wang et al., “Naive Bayesian Classifier for Rapid Assignment of rRNA Sequences into the New Bacterial Taxonomy,” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 73, no. 16 (2007): 5261–67; Jun S. Liu, “The Collapsed Gibbs Sampler in Bayesian Computations with Applications to a Gene Regulation Problem,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 89, no. 427 (1994): 958–66.
“railway and mining” Andrew Hargadon and Robert I. Sutton, “Technology Brokering and Innovation in a Product Development Firm,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1997): 716–49.
gambling techniques René Carmona et al., Numerical Methods in Finance: Bordeaux, June 2010, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics, vol. 12 (Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012); René Carmona et al., “An Introduction to Particle Methods with Financial Application,” in Numerical Methods in Finance, 3–49; Pierre Del Moral, Mean Field Simulation for Monte Carlo Integration (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2013); Roger Eckhardt, “Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and the Monte Carlo Method,” Los Alamos Science, special issue (1987): 131–37.
in the shape of a hat Andrew Hargadon and Robert I. Sutton, “Technology Brokering and Innovation in a Product Development Firm,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1997): 716–49; Roger P. Brown, “Polymers in Sport and Leisure,” Rapra Review Reports 12, no. 3 (November 2, 2001); Melissa Larson, “From Bombers to Bikes,” Quality 37, no. 9 (1998): 30.
child-rearing techniques Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1946).
“evaluated as valuable” Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 2 (2004): 349–99.
succeeded somewhere else In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Burt wrote: “Managers offered their best idea for improving the value of their function to the company. The two senior executives in the function evaluated each idea (stripped of personal identification). The summary evaluation of each idea turned out to be primarily predicted by the extent to which the person who articulated the idea had a network that reached across boundaries (structural holes) between network groups, functions, divisions in the company.”
pushed the right way For more on the concept of brokerage, please see Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Ronald S. Burt, “The Contingent Value of Social Capital,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1997): 339–65; Ronald S. Burt, “The Network Structure of Social Capital,” in B. M. Staw and R. I. Sutton, Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 22 (New York: Elsevier Science JAI, 2000), 345–423; Ronald S. Burt, Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ronald S. Burt, “The Social Structure of Competition,” Explorations in Economic Sociology 65 (1993): 103; Lee Fleming, Santiago Mingo, and David Chen, “Collaborative Brokerage, Generative Creativity, and Creative Success,” Administrative Science Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2007): 443–75; Satu Parjanen, Vesa Harmaakorpi, and Tapani Frantsi, “Collective Creativity and Brokerage Functions in Heavily Cross-Disciplined Innovation Processes,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–21; Thomas Heinze and Gerrit Bauer, “Characterizing Creative Scientists in Nano-S&T: Productivity, Multidisciplinarity, and Network Brokerage in a Longitudinal Perspective,” Scientometrics 70, no. 3 (2007): 811–30; Markus Baer, “The Strength-of-Weak-Ties Perspective on Creativity: A Comprehensive Examination and Extension,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95, no. 3 (2010): 592; Ajay Mehra, Martin Kilduff, and Daniel J. Brass, “The Social Networks of High and Low Self-Monitors: Implications for Workplace Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2001): 121–46.
plot’s central tensions I am indebted to the New York Public Library for making an early draft version of the West Side Story script available to me. This is an abridgment of that script, shortened for ease of representation.
communicated through dance This text is a combination of finished versions of the West Side Story script, Robbins’s notes, and interviews providing a description of the choreography from the first staging of the show and other sources.
“essential dramatic information” Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” American Music (1992): 136–69.
the original Maria Fishko, “Real Life Drama Behind West Side Story.”
coffee cups and to-do lists The Frozen core team included Buck, Lee, Del Vecho, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Paul Briggs, Jessica Julius, Tom MacDougall, Chris Montan, and, at times, others from various departments.
upstate New York In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, a spokeswoman for Walt Disney Animation Studios wrote that Lee “and her sister fought, as kids do; they grew together as they grew older. They were never estranged….In college, they became close. They lived together in NYC for a while, even.”
“ourselves on the screen” In an email sent in response to fact-checking questions, Millstein wrote: “Solutions to story issues [are often] connected to personal emotional experiences. We draw from our own stories, history and emotional lives as a wellspring of inspiration….We also draw on the experiences of others throughout the studio and deep research into specific areas that a film may attempt to explore. In the case of Frozen, we had a built-in research group at Disney Animation: employees who are sisters. They can describe firsthand what it’s like to have a sister as a sibling and the life experiences they’ve had. This is wonderful firsthand source material.”