Original + Unique = What?

Jeffery Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation SKG, had the following observations regarding leadership:

In the world today, the most important thing is making people feel secure. We're in a moment when people don't want to take risks, they don't want to gamble. In my business, it you stop being creative and innovative, you're finished.

And so striking this balance, the equation works quite simply like this: To succeed at the high end of the movie business, you must be original and unique. Now if you were putting an equation up on the white board and you wrote "original + unique = what," the answer would have to be "risky." And if you said "risky = what," the answer would be "some failure." If you don't make failure acceptable, you can't have original and unique.

And so in a world that brutally punishes failure, we work so hard to provide for our 2,000 employees the understanding that they are expected to take risks. There will be misses, and it's O.K. We're prepared for it. They're not as good as hits, by the way. But we don't run the enterprise thinking that every simple thing will be a hit. It can't be. That's what I'd call a gravity-defier.