ED CATMULL

What Makes Creative People Tick? Structuring and Operating Creative Organizations

Ed Catmull outlines techniques and ideas on leading creative organizations. Some of the leadership philosophies he explores are:

• Addressing hidden barriers to creativity
• Uncoupling fear and failure
• Getting the team right (if you want to get the ideas right)
• Preparing for unknown problems
• Making the process better, but knowing the true goal is to make something great
• Ensuring that a company’s communication structure does not mirror its organizational structure

Creativity Inc.: OVERCOMING THE UNSEEN FORCES THAT STAND IN THE WAY OF TRUE INSPIRATION

Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”

For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such be-loved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, WALL-E, and Inside Out, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, 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 at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his co-founding Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on leadership and management 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.

• If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
• 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.
   

Behind the Traditions and Rituals

Long before Pixar was one of the world’s most successful movie studios, it was a small hardware company struggling to stay afloat. Ed Catmull, who co-founded the company in 1986, led Pixar toward its goal of making the first-ever computer animated movie, in turn growing it into the creative, innovative force it is today. Devoted fans of Pixar movies will enjoy this look behind the scenes of the heretofore mysterious world of Pixar, as well as learning about the underlying principles behind their approach. Catmull will also talk about working with Steve Jobs—how Jobs contributed to Pixar and how Pixar transformed Steve Jobs.