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“Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company
For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.
As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:
• Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better.
• It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them.
• The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateApril 8, 2014
- File size28401 KB
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This book is about how to foster creativity in a business environment, based on the experiences of the co-founder of Pixar.Popular highlight
Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.10,203 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.9,953 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.9,873 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.8,859 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Achieving enormous success while holding fast to the highest artistic standards is a nice trick—and Pixar, with its creative leadership and persistent commitment to innovation, has pulled it off. This book should be required reading for any manager.”—Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
“Steve Jobs—not a man inclined to hyperbole when asked about the qualities of others—once described Ed Catmull as ‘very wise,’ ‘very self-aware,’ ‘really thoughtful,’ ‘really, really smart,’ and possessing ‘quiet strength,’ all in a single interview. Any reader of Creativity, Inc., Catmull’s new book on the art of running creative companies, will have to agree. Catmull, president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written what just might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company
“It’s one thing to be creative; it’s entirely another—and much more rare—to build a great and creative culture. Over more than thirty years, Ed Catmull has developed methods to root out and destroy the barriers to creativity, to marry creativity to the pursuit of excellence, and, most impressive, to sustain a culture of disciplined creativity during setbacks and success. Pixar’s unrivaled record, and the joy its films have added to our lives, gives his method the most important validation: It works.”—Jim Collins, co-author of Built to Last and author of Good to Great
“Too often, we seek to keep the status quo working. This is a book about breaking it.”—Seth Godin
“What is the secret to making more of the good stuff? Every so often Hollywood embraces a book that it senses might provide the answer. . . . Catmull’s book is quickly becoming the latest bible for the show business crowd.”—The New York Times
“The most practical and deep book ever written by a practitioner on the topic of innovation.”—Prof. Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business School
“Business gurus love to tell stories about Pixar, but this is our first chance to hear the real story from someone who lived it and led it. Everyone interested in managing innovation—or just good managing—needs to read this book.”—Chip Heath, co-author of Switch and Decisive
“A fascinating story about how some very smart people built something that profoundly changed the animation business and, along the way, popular culture . . . [Creativity, Inc.] is a well-told tale, full of detail about an interesting, intricate business. For fans of Pixar films, it’s a must-read. For fans of management books, it belongs on the ‘value added’ shelf.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Pixar uses technology only as a means to an end; its films are rooted in human concerns, not computer wizardry. The same can be said of Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull’s endearingly thoughtful explanation of how the studio he co-founded generated hits such as the Toy Story trilogy, Up and Wall-E. . . . [Catmull] uses Pixar’s triumphs and near-disasters to outline a system for managing people in creative businesses—one in which candid criticism is delivered sensitively, while individuality and autonomy are not strangled by a robotic corporate culture.”—Financial Times
“A wonderful new book . . . Unlike most books written by founders, this isn’t some myth-heavy legacy project—it’s far closer to a blueprint. Catmull takes us inside the Pixar ecosystem and shows how they build and refine excellence, in revelatory detail. . . . If you do creative work, you should read it, now.”—Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code
“A superb debut intended for managers in all fields of endeavor . . . He takes readers inside candid discussions and retreats at which participants, assuming the early versions of movies are bad, explore ways to improve them. Unusually rich in ideas, insights and experiences, the book celebrates the benefits of an open, nurturing work environment. An immensely readable and rewarding book that will challenge and inspire readers to make their workplaces hotbeds of creativity.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Punctuated with surprising tales of how the company’s films were developed and the company’s financial struggles, Catmull shares insights about harnessing talent, creating teams, protecting the creative process, candid communications, organizational structures, alignment, and the importance of storytelling. . . . [Creativity, Inc.] will delight and inspire creative individuals and their managers, as well as anyone who wants to work ‘in an environment that fosters creativity and problem solving.’”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“For anyone managing anything, and particularly those trying to manage creative teams, Catmull is like a kind, smart godfather guiding us toward managing wisely, without losing our souls, and in a way that works toward greatness. Perhaps it’s all Up from there.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Many have attempted to formulate and categorize inspiration and creativity. What Ed Catmull shares instead is his astute experience that creativity isn’t strictly a well of ideas, but an alchemy of people. In Creativity, Inc. Ed reveals, with commonsense specificity and honesty, examples of how not to get in your own way and how to realize a creative coalescence of art, business, and innovation.”—George Lucas
“This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another.”—Robert I. Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No A**hole Rule and co-author of Scaling Up Excellence
About the Author
Amy Wallace is a journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine. Previously, she worked as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times. She is also the co-host of Riveted, a podcast about great storytelling.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Animated
For thirteen years we had a table in the large conference room at Pixar that we call West One. Though it was beautiful, I grew to hate this table. It was long and skinny, like one of those things you’d see in a comedy sketch about an old wealthy couple that sits down for dinner—one person at either end, a candelabra in the middle—and has to shout to make conversation. The table had been chosen by a designer Steve Jobs liked, and it was elegant, all right—but it impeded our work.
We’d hold regular meetings about our movies around that table—thirty of us facing off in two long lines, often with more people seated along the walls—and everyone was so spread out that it was difficult to communicate. For those unlucky enough to be seated at the far ends, ideas didn’t flow because it was nearly impossible to make eye contact without craning your neck. Moreover, because it was important that the director and producer of the film in question be able to hear what everyone was saying, they had to be placed at the center of the table. So did Pixar’s creative leaders: John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative officer, and me, and a handful of our most experienced directors, producers, and writers. To ensure that these people were always seated together, someone began making place cards. We might as well have been at a formal dinner party.
When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe. But unwittingly, we were allowing this table—and the resulting place card ritual—to send a different message. The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, it implied, the more important—the more central—you must be. And the farther away, the less likely you were to speak up—your distance from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive. If the table was crowded, as it often was, still more people would sit in chairs around the edges of the room, creating yet a third tier of participants (those at the center of the table, those at the ends, and those not at the table at all). Without intending to, we’d created an obstacle that discouraged people from jumping in.
Over the course of a decade, we held countless meetings around this table in this way—completely unaware of how doing so undermined our own core principles. Why were we blind to this? Because the seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders, including me. Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Those not sitting at the center of the table, meanwhile, saw quite clearly how it established a pecking order but presumed that we—the leaders—had intended that outcome. Who were they, then, to complain?
It wasn’t until we happened to have a meeting in a smaller room with a square table that John and I realized what was wrong. Sitting around that table, the interplay was better, the exchange of ideas more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. Every person there, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up. This was not only what we wanted, it was a fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position. At our long, skinny table, comfortable in our middle seats, we had utterly failed to recognize that we were behaving contrary to that basic tenet. Over time, we’d fallen into a trap. Even though we were conscious that a room’s dynamics are critical to any good discussion, even though we believed that we were constantly on the lookout for problems, our vantage point blinded us to what was right before our eyes.
Emboldened by this new insight, I went to our Facilities Department. “Please,” I said, “I don’t care how you do it, but get that table out of there.” I wanted something that could be arranged into a more intimate square, so people could address each other directly and not feel like they didn’t matter. A few days later, as a critical meeting on an upcoming movie approached, our new table was installed, solving the problem.
Still, interestingly, there were remnants of that problem that did not immediately vanish just because we’d solved it. For example, the next time I walked into West One, I saw the brand-new table, arranged—as requested—in a more intimate square that made it possible for more people to interact at once. But the table was adorned with the same old place cards! While we’d fixed the key problem that had made place cards seem necessary, the cards themselves had become a tradition that would continue until we specifically dismantled it. This wasn’t as troubling an issue as the table itself, but it was something we had to address because cards implied hierarchy, and that was precisely what we were trying to avoid. When Andrew Stanton, one of our directors, entered the meeting room that morning, he grabbed several place cards and began randomly moving them around, narrating as he went. “We don’t need these anymore!” he said in a way that everyone in the room grasped. Only then did we succeed in eliminating this ancillary problem.
This is the nature of management. Decisions are made, usually for good reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions. So when problems arise—and they always do—disentangling them is not as simple as correcting the original error. Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is the problem you know you are trying to solve—think of that as an oak tree—and then there are all the other problems—think of these as saplings—that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down.
Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is. Pixar today is managed according to this principle, but in a way I’ve been searching all my life for better ways of seeing. It began decades before Pixar even existed.
When I was a kid, I used to plunk myself down on the living room floor of my family’s modest Salt Lake City home a few minutes before 7 p.m. every Sunday and wait for Walt Disney. Specifically, I’d wait for him to appear on our black-and-white RCA with its tiny 12-inch screen. Even from a dozen feet away—the accepted wisdom at the time was that viewers should put one foot between them and the TV for every inch of screen—I was transfixed by what I saw.
Each week, Walt Disney himself opened the broadcast of The Wonderful World of Disney. Standing before me in suit and tie, like a kindly neighbor, he would demystify the Disney magic. He’d explain the use of synchronized sound in Steamboat Willie or talk about the importance of music in Fantasia. He always went out of his way to give credit to his forebears, the men—and, at this point, they were all men—who’d done the pioneering work upon which he was building his empire. He’d introduce the television audience to trailblazers such as Max Fleischer, of Koko the Clown and Betty Boop fame, and Winsor McCay, who made Gertie the Dinosaur—the first animated film to feature a character that expressed emotion—in 1914. He’d gather a group of his animators, designers, and storyboard artists to explain how they made Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck come to life. Each week, Disney created a made-up world, used cutting-edge technology to enable it, and then told us how he’d done it.
Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being—both artistically and technologically—that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was. I read every Einstein biography I could get my hands on as well as a little book he wrote on his theory of relativity. I loved how the concepts he developed forced people to change their approach to physics and matter, to view the universe from a different perspective. Wild-haired and iconic, Einstein dared to bend the implications of what we thought we knew. He solved the biggest puzzles of all and, in doing so, changed our understanding of reality.
Product details
- ASIN : B00FUZQYBO
- Publisher : Random House; 1st edition (April 8, 2014)
- Publication date : April 8, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 28401 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 478 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0593729706
- Best Sellers Rank: #135,732 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #41 in Biographies of Business Professionals
- #63 in Creativity Self-Help
- #108 in Business Leadership
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is a computer scientist and current president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios (including the latter's DisneyToon Studios division). As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by VES_Awards_89.jpg: Jeff Heusser derivative work: Ahonc (This file was derived from VES Awards 89.jpg:) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Amy Wallace is an American journalist and author. She is the co-author, with Ed Catmull, of the 2014 bestselling book Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Her magazine work, which has been twice nominated for a National Magazine Award, has appeared in Esquire, Elle, GQ, Men’s Journal, New York, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. She lives in Pasadena, California.
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Customers find the writing style candorous, creative, and self-aware. They also appreciate the author's honesty and tolerance of mistakes. Readers describe the book as a great read with an engaging storyline. They find the content insightful, interesting, and nuanced. Additionally, they describe the spread sheets as easy to read.
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Customers find the book thought-provoking, insightful, and creative. They also say the author does an exceptional job of demystifying what it takes to create and maintain a world. Readers also say it's full of practical advice and inspiring stories that not only apply to the film industry. They say it’s a great book about creativity and how to lead an organization.
"...Forces That Stand in The Way of True Inspiration is a great book about creativity and about how to lead an organization...." Read more
"...It offers a real life example of how Pixar built and continues to strive to maintain their success to this day...." Read more
"...That chapter is quite a good summarisation. Some of the tips there in are very revealing like..." Read more
"...He provides real-world cases and experiences to back up his assertions, never coming off as a clueless executive who’s just regurgitating the same..." Read more
Customers find the book a great read and brilliant.
"...More importantly it is the very best book I’ve ever read about unleashing the initiative and creativity of people in an organization." Read more
"...It’s just a very fun, honest, and insightful read...." Read more
"...But as I said, the last chapter is worth all the effort. Do read that, even if it means paying for the whole book - it is worth it!!" Read more
"I had to read this for the grad program I am in and it was just a fascinating read...." Read more
Customers find the storyline very engaging, amazing, and beautifully personal. They also say it's one of the most open and beautifully written chapters about Steve Jobs.
"...It’s just a very fun, honest, and insightful read...." Read more
"...That chapter is quite a good summarisation. Some of the tips there in are very revealing like..." Read more
"...The author's use of numerous examples enriches the narrative, offering readers a deep and intimate understanding of the challenges faced by Pixar..." Read more
"...Great story and learning tool for anyone interested in design theory and how to manage teams." Read more
Customers find the book's writing style candor, self-awareness, and creative. They also say it's an inspiring view of Pixar from the inside, extremely humble, and self-effacing. Readers also appreciate the forums for constructive criticism and the matter-of-fact insight. They say the book provides more variety of input.
"...It’s just a very fun, honest, and insightful read...." Read more
"...5. Short Experiments. Experimentation often leads to innovation, learning, and the development of skills that can be utilized on larger projects...." Read more
"...into the inner workings of Pixar, providing readers with a fascinating look at the culture that underpins one of the most innovative and successful..." Read more
"...He is humble, caring, trusting, and brutally honest...." Read more
Customers find the book very readable, fantastic, and easy to grasp. They also say the presentation is straightforward and fast. Readers also mention that the spread sheets are quite easy for old line managers.
"...who grew up with Disney and Pixar movies this book will be very hard to put down whether you are a manager or not...." Read more
"...With a conversational tone and common-sense, straightforward presentation, the author presents a great framework for anyone interested understanding..." Read more
"...This overtone makes the book easy to read and relatable in an imaginative way...." Read more
"...Written mostly from Catmull’s narrative, Creativity Inc. is an easy read even for non-business readers...." Read more
Customers find the book provides wonderful insight into the history of Pixar, with excellent background on the development of his dream. They also say it's a fairly detailed history of the company.
"...It is cool to learn about Pixar in its early days and Steve Jobs involvement...." Read more
"Overall nice book. Especially the stories about Pixar were interesting...." Read more
"...The Pixar Touch" on the other hand is a fairly detailed history of the company, and to me was a much more interesting read (I read them back to back)..." Read more
"...It's a true insider's look into Pixar (Catmull is one of Pixar's creators) & how to be a smarter/better/more people-centric manager...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the complexity of the book. Some mention it has detailed explanations with a lot of real life examples. They say it distills how to manage, lead, and be a creative leader. However, some feel it lacks organization and organization. They also find it difficult to identify with the chapter about The Hungry Beast.
"...With a conversational tone and common-sense, straightforward presentation, the author presents a great framework for anyone interested understanding..." Read more
"...It is an outline guide for just maybe getting your school or district, or company for that matter, on the road to creativity...." Read more
"...did get a little repetitive and that’s where I felt it lacked a slight bit of organization...." Read more
"...The management guide is fine, but the history is better and more interesting in my view... but the intent of the reader will guide the choice......" Read more
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There is a vast literature out there about how individual people can tap into their natural, God-given creativity. There’s no one best book in this crop, but if you find one that works for you, that one’s the best as far as you’re concerned.
There’s not a lot about how organizations and leaders can unleash creativity and most of it is platitudes on parade. We’re told to “fail fast and fail often” as if failing was the point. It’s not. Learning is the point. We’re told to tell people they should not be afraid to fail. What nonsense. Nobody likes to fail, and if they’re afraid to fail, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. We’re also given that advice as if there is an alternative to doing creative cutting-edge work without getting it wrong, mostly at the beginning. There isn’t. That’s the way the world works.
Some writers do a better job on this by talking about ways you can structure things so that a failure is more likely to be seen as a learning experience and where criticism and bad news can be received as gifts rather than attacks. But there’s precious little in those books about how you actually make it work and then keep it working over time.
Creativity Inc is different. The primary reason is Ed Catmull and his willingness to talk about the details of both his and Pixar’s journeys. Here’s what I consider the key quote from very early in the book.
“What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; but we work hard to uncover those problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.”
Early in the book, Catmull tells the story of a table in a meeting room at Pixar. The table, evidently, looks like most of the tables in most meeting rooms that I’ve been in. It was rectangular. Most of us have heard that tables with that shape aren’t exactly symbols of an egalitarian culture and that they stifle open discussion. But we keep meeting around those tables. So did Pixar.
“Over the course of a decade, we held countless meetings around this table in this way – completely unaware of how doing so undermined our own core principles.”
When Catmull and his crew become aware of the effect of the table, they change it. Good for them. Then they discover that there are other behaviors that may have been linked to the table originally but continue after the table is changed. For example, on the old table there were place cards indicating where people sat. Powerful people at the ends, junior people toward the middle. The new square table removed the power of shape but the place cards had become common practice, too. So, when Catmull came into the room for a meeting around the new table, he found place cards indicating where everyone should sit.
That is the book in a nutshell. Catmull covers a lot of ground and many topics, but the core book is about how he, John Lasseter, and other people at Pixar, uncovered problems and worked to solve them, nurtured creative energy, and dealt with the inevitable conflicts and surprises. Every organization that I’ve ever worked with or visited has had similar issues.
One problem putting together the review for this book is that it is simply riddled with wisdom. So, rather than give you the standard chapter summaries that I put in most reviews, I’m going to list each of the four sections and name the chapters that are in it, then share some quotes from that section. I’m sure that when you read the book, you will find your own insightful bits that are different from mine.
Part 1 is called Getting Started. The four chapters, Animated, Pixar Is Born, A Defining Goal, and Establishing Pixar’s Identity, tell the story of Ed Catmull and Pixar up until the success of “Toy Story.”
"I also didn’t yet know that my self-assigned mission was about much more than technology. To pull it off, we’d have to be creative not only technically but also in the ways that we worked together."
"What had drawn me to science, all those years ago, was the search for understanding. Human interaction is far more complex than relativity or string theory, of course, but that only made it more interesting and important; it constantly challenged my presumptions. As we made more movies, I would learn that some of my beliefs about why and how Pixar had been successful were wrong. But one thing could not have been more plain: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do."
Part 2 is titled Protecting the New. That’s a theme that will run through the book from here on. The chapters are: Honesty and Candor, Fear and Failure, The Hungry Beast and The Ugly Baby, Change and Randomness, and The Hidden.
“Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’ This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp”
“So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.”
"One of the biggest barriers is fear, and while failure comes with the territory, fear shouldn’t have to. The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure—to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts."
"If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead."
Part 3 is titled Building and Sustaining. There are only two chapters: Broadening Our View and The Unmade Future.
"This third section of the book is devoted to some of the specific methods we have employed at Pixar to prevent our disparate views from hindering our collaboration. In each case, we are trying to force ourselves—individually and as a company—to challenge our preconceptions."
"Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional. Postmortems are one route into that understanding.”
Part 4, titled Testing What We Know, also has just two chapters. They are A New Challenge and Notes Day.
"The future is not a destination—it is a direction."
One more thing. Steve Jobs played a critical role in Pixar’s success and Ed Catmull has included an afterword called The Steve Jobs We Knew. My friend, Bob Sutton, has said that Steve Jobs is something of a Rorschach test for people. You see what you think you see, and other people see the same thing and interpret it differently. My problem has always been that most of the views of Jobs freeze him in time and they don’t indicate any growth or maturity. No one as intelligent or introspective as Steve Jobs would have stayed the same for his entire life. What I loved about the afterword is that it not only gave a unique view of Jobs as both a business partner and a friend, but also talked about his growth during his life.
Bottom Line
Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in The Way of True Inspiration is a great book about creativity and about how to lead an organization. More importantly it is the very best book I’ve ever read about unleashing the initiative and creativity of people in an organization.
This is not just a book on managing a creative team. It offers a real life example of how Pixar built and continues to strive to maintain their success to this day. For people who grew up with Disney and Pixar movies this book will be very hard to put down whether you are a manager or not. Catmull takes you through a firsthand account of not only the creation of Pixar, but a behind the scenes look at the movies as well, like “Toy Story” and “Up”, and how they grew from an idea and evolved over time. Along the way he explains how he developed his view on management.
It’s great for anyone looking for ways to lead a team and inspire a sense of community and collaboration. I would recommend this not just for creative teams, but any team that involves any kind of critical thinking. This book comes straight from experience with ideas on management that can actually be implemented unlike a few books I have read.
A few topics he covers: As obvious from the title he writes about how managers need to attack problems head on, even the ones you may not be able to see, before they fester and start to hurt the company. To be able to find these hidden problems, he explains how important it is to create an environment where employees are comfortable to speak their minds and be as candid as they want without fear of consequences or failure. He also talks about how to balance a growing company and the demand to push product with the goal of keeping your products quality at the forefront.
The style of the authors writing is very relaxed. He likes to offer up many (at times a little too many) metaphors for the points he is really trying to get across to the reader. It was all great information, but it did get a little repetitive and that’s where I felt it lacked a slight bit of organization. This may just come from the fact that this book has a co-writer as well. All in all even if I wasn’t a business major and it wasn’t assigned, I would still choose to read it. It’s just a very fun, honest, and insightful read. I guarantee you will truly appreciate how honest Ed is in sharing his story and both his successes as well as his failures, because in my opinion we usually learn more from our failures than we ever do from success.
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As mentioned in the title his self awareness and modesty fill every page, he gives examples of where Pixar have even had it wrong at times but then details how focusing on the importance of taking the learnings from these situations made them constantly improve.
There’s also some great stories of Steve Jobs in there. I found these very interesting as you rarely hear what he was like outside of the Apple world.
Essential reading for managers.
En cuanto a la calidad del libro, es de primerísima calidad y llegó en poco tiempo y buenas condiciones