Change And Organization

Change And Organization

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Table of Contents

Introduction3

History and Background3

Relationship between Pixar and Disney4

Present Situation5

Cultural Issue with Respect to the Merger with Disney6

Theoretical Framework7

Transformational Leadership7

Organizational Learning8

Teamwork8

Analysis of the Culture of Pixar after Merger with Disney9

Conclusion15

References16

Change And Organization

Introduction

The history of Pixar goes back to 1984 when John Lasseter, today's chief creative officer of both Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, started working for the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm which Steve Jobs bought after two years and renamed “Pixar”. In 1991, after a number of short films and commercials with some of them winning various awards, Pixar and Disney pooled forces aiming to make the first full-length computer-animated movie. Released in 1995, Toy Story was an enormous success and marked the beginning of Pixar's unbroken triumph to date.

Having once prolonged their agreement to work together in 1997, and having released Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, all outstanding successes, Disney eventually acquired Pixar in 2006. However, instead of absorbing Pixar, people in charge at Disney explicitly agreed to let Pixar continue as it did before and even secured the preservation of the 'Pixar Culture' in their contract (Telegraph Media Group Limited, 2009). In fact, Disney used the merger to revive its own spirits, for example, by promoting John Lasseter to his above-mentioned position (Barney, 1991).

History and Background

Pixar was first founded in the late 70s to be exact in 1979 by the name of The Graphics Group, and was one third of what is now Lucasfilm. During these initial years, the company just provided graphics and animation support to Lucasfilm's short films. However, in 1986 the group was bought by Steve Jobs, co founder of Apple Inc, who paid $5 million to George Lucas and put an additional $5 million in the company as capital. The company was then headed by Steve Jobs himself who was the chairman of the company and CEO of the company (Gilbert, 2007).

Relationship between Pixar and Disney

In the initial years, Pixar was just a high end computer hardware provider that sold Pixar Image Computer, which were primarily sold to the government and medical organizations. One of the key buyers of the Pixar Computer was Walt Disney that wanted to put the painstaking work of drawing, sketching and painting into a more automated system. However, the Pixar Computer did not cope well in the market. In an attempt to boost the sales of the company, John Lasseter a company employee who was creating short animation films for demonstration of the system's capacity, premiered his short film that he created for Pixar at SIGGRAPH which and received much acclaim. Hence, the company decided to shut down its hardware business in 1990, and started working on computer animated commercials of other acclaimed companies and brands such as Tropicana, Life Savers, Listerine, and Terminator 2: The Judgement Day. The same year the company decided to move to Richmond, California from San Rafael. However, during all this time the company remained in touch ...