Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in The Way of True Inspiration is the intertwined stories of Ed Catmull and Pixar Animation. It’s more than that, though. It may be the best book you’ll ever read about how leaders and organizations can make it possible for people to use their whole creative brain power. I know that’s a bold statement. Here’s why I make it. 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.

"I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture." Ed Catmull There is no doubt that Pixar is one of the most creative companies in the world today. They accomplished an "insanely great feat" by creating the first all computer animated feature film, Toy Story, at a time when naysayers were telling them it couldn't be done. Since then, they have created a series of computer-animated films that have thrilled kids and adults every where. One of my most memorable times was sitting in a theater watching Finding Nemo and Cars with my toddler son. What exactly does it take to foster the kind of organizational culture that is capable of doing what nobody else is doing? How can companies, schools and non-profit organizations create what Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, the authors of Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, call a "sustainable creative culture?" Catmull and Wallace tackle that very task in this book with a rare combination of both narrative and common sense. Catmull begins this book by telling Pixar's story, and a fascinating story it is. He describes the company's rise from a part of George Lucas's film company, Lucasfilm, through their partnership with Steve Jobs, to the present day as a company that churns our computer-animated films to anxiously awaiting audiences world-wide. Catmull's anecdotes and stories throughout the book remain true to what he repeats throughout the book: creativity is about the story, and in this book he tells an engaging one for those fascinated with creativity and how it might be fostered within an organization. In addition to the Pixar story, Catmull and Wallace also provide valuable insight throughout the book on how Pixar has been able to maintain its creative edge through the years. For example, Catmull insists that creative cultures must operate with transparency and candor. People who work in those cultures must have the freedom to speak their minds and feel that what they say matters. That's perhaps common sense to some leaders, but many seem to forget that, especially in the "top-down" reform environment we have in public education today. Catmull provides a valuable list of "Starting Points for Managing a Creative Culture" in back of the book. These "starting points" are referred to repeatedly throughout the book as Catmull and Wallace tell Pixar's story. What are some of these "starting points?" * "When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today." * "If there are people in organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere." * "It isn't enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.: * "There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right." This list of "starting points" by Catmull is extensive. They touch on subjects such as inviting failure and risk in the company or organization. Engaging the whole company is fixing problems is another. From a leadership perspective, this list is truly a great starting point for fostering creativity in your organization. While this book focuses on creativity in Pixar, a business designed to invent and innovate to stay alive, it is also an excellent book for school leaders and leaders of any organization to read in order to answer the question for themselves: "How can we create a sustainable creative culture capable of tackling our most serious problems?" Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration is a book I see myself pondering and thinking about for some time. It is an outline guide for just maybe getting your school or district, or company for that matter, on the road to creativity. As a high school principal of a non-traditional high school, I see much of the wisdom of this book has the potential to transforms schools and school districts into places where creativity rather than conformity thrives.

Defintively worth buying. It changes your entire view on pixar, but also and most importantly on the creative industry or any kind of industry. It lends you insight into one of the most unconventional and succesfull companies and the evolution of computer grafics. Even of you don't understand s**t about economy or managing or filmmaking or computers (like me) it's easy to understand and interesting to read and changes a lot of your preconcieved ideas. The only downside is the price. It costs thrice as much as the spanish version which is odd and I discovered too late.

The first couple of chapters were the tonic I needed to get inspired in my chosen idea I am attempting to accomplish. Then the author talks about how to be a manager of a company, moral and ethical standards regarding managerial issues at the workplace. I will continue reading the book at some point. But I was more interested in the author having close interaction with great entrepreneurs aka Steve Jobs and George Lucas

This book is fantastic and full of well thought out concepts that would work for any industry but especially those in entertainment. I’ll be transferring my learnings to my game team for sure!

Excelente libro. A todo el que esté en un ambiente de gestión de equipos o que tenga que ver con temas de creatividad y generación de ideas se lo recomiendo mucho. Más que una historia sobre Pixar, es un recuento de experiencias para ejemplificar cómo generar un ambiente donde la gente se sienta cómoda y se propicie la creatividad para tener un desempeño más eficiente. En cuanto a la calidad del libro, es de primerísima calidad y llegó en poco tiempo y buenas condiciones

Bought the Kindle version after giving away several print copies. Creativity, Inc is an evergreen classic and essential reading for anyone working or interested in creative businesses, high-performance teams, org change and transformation, innovation, digital media, etc. Part biography, part history of animation, part chronicle of founding and growth of Pixar, with a cast of creatives and mavericks, and cameos from Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Peter O'Toole, Mickey Mouse and the luminaries of C20 animation. Meditations on leadership, culture, failure, planning, teams, strategy, and change, written with humility and human warmth. Buy it. Buy two copies because you will want to give one away while you are reading the other. Highly recommended.