Brad Bird on Innovation in Found/Read

If you are interested in motivating your team and fostering innovation, this post of an interview with the Pixar creative genius, Brad Bird, at Found/Read, the latest GigaOm network blog, is a "must-read". The interview was originally published in the McKinsey Quarterly and in her post, Carleen Hawn breaks down the interview into nine lessons well-worth learning.
Although I think all of these lessons are extremely prescient, Lesson 8, "Get Rid of Weak Links", strikes me as perhaps the most critical as well as the most challenging.
In my 12 years of owning and operating a large strategic communications firm, time and time again my business partner and I would recognize a "weak link" within the staff. The negativism and poor performance would continually bring down the morale and performance level of other team members. But invariably we found it immensely difficult to deal with the issue.
As one of our advisory board members once reminded us, it's more important to water the flowers than the weeds.
Also, as a side note, I'm proud to say that Brad Bird is from my home town, the idyllic Corvallis, Oregon.
Brad, thanks for the awesome work!