Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Written by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Narrated by Peter Altschuler
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, the Academy Award–winning studio behind Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story, this guide to turning a dream into success makes a perfect graduation gift.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Huffington Post • Financial Times • Success • Inc. • Library Journal
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 beloved 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.
Editor's Note
Inspiring…
If you want to learn about being creative at work, go to the master. Ed Catmull is one of the cofounders of Pixar Animation, and as this book makes clear, the creative spark inspires every aspect of company culture at Pixar—which is how so much of it shows through in their films.
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Reviews for Creativity, Inc.
595 ratings61 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catmull's enlightening book reinforced what I've sensed for a quite some time: I prefer self-help tomes to be written in terse form with "bite-sized" morsels of advice. Most of the book showcases behind-the-scenes activities at Pixar. This wasn't a deal-breaker for me, as I've always been interested in the movie industry (footnote: not buying Pixar stock is one of my biggest all-time investment regrets... I wanted to invest in Pixar in the earliest stages but was talked out of it by someone who allegedly knows more about "these type of things.") But I digress! As one reviewer accurately noted, most of the crystalized advice appears near the end of the work. True, many anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book make excellent points about everything from the benefits of failure (but try to fail fast), to the virtues of brainstorming. But the stories often provide TMI. I'm glad I read the book, because it definitely offers excellent insights about management and innovation. I just happen to believe these insights could have been served up in a more efficient way.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ed Catmull is the president of Pixar Studios. How Pixar came to be what they are today is a remarkable story -- one that very nearly ended prematurely back in the company's early days. I had no idea they started out as a hardware company designing high-end graphic workstations, for example.Mostly this book is a history of the company, with anecdotes of useful commentary to insure the reader is learning the lessons Catmull and crew learned -- often the hard way. Some of it is skewed towards the particular business of creating a unique, expensive product like a movie. A catastrophic disaster can instantly sink such a company -- this nearly happened when the work files of one of their movies was completely deleted from a production server during routine maintenance and there was no apparent backup. By happy accident, an employee working from home had a week or so earlier copied all of the files to her local machine because it was too slow working remotely. Creative types don't respond very well to rigid structure, so flexibility is often called for. Catmull discusses several occasions when the tenuous relationship between staff and management became strained by errant policy decisions, and what was done to reverse such setbacks. Acquisitions are another topic covered in detail. While Pixar was acquired by Disney, the Pixar management not only stayed in place but also took over Disney Animation Studios, and a culture clash ensued.There are plenty of dry management books out there, this is not one of them. I try to read a couple of management-related books a year just for professional development; I wish all were as entertaining to read as this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent Book. I want to watch more Pixar movies with my kids after getting a glimpse of the founders, their values, and how they encourage a great work environment.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant insight into the creative process of a brilliant company!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fascinating, entertaining, and applicable to numerous walks of life. Loved it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From beginning to end this book provides and entertaining glimpse of the creative process in Pixar. Examples and stories inspire those of us that wish to learn what should and should not be done when organizing and managing your creative organization.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A fantastic book, made me think about things differently, made me think about my insecurities whenever you come across
Somebody who might be really capable and who might one day take your job, how thinking like that is a limp that keeps you from sorounding yourself with the best people possible. I loved this book, makes you think and it's enjoyable. Wish I could someday meet the author - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a completely out of the box, inspiring book!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I do not usually read management books, nor other self help books and after reading this one accidentally I see why; this book helps to underscore not solutions but the pervasiveness of problems and their inevitability and the correctness of that. in short it is insightful and interesting and well worth reading for anyone engaged in anything creative.
thanks to the author. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very straightforward book about creating a positive culture for you family, business, or life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book, I especially recommend to professionals in creative industries.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Really truly inspirational. Great descriptive and historical representation of how Pixar was ran focused on what really set it apart.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The highlights and explanation of the creative culture in present society.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Incredible. Anyone in an office even if not in leadership should listen/read this book
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is great for creatives like me. I love listening to how creative businesses come to be and the processes of how others create. I learned so much that I can apply to my creative endeavors.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A truly inspiring book that outlines the principles of making a successful creative journey, while acknowledging the power of one’s own exploration and belief in their values that is required for one to achieve their goals.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inspirerend, persoonlijk, ook wel langdradig soms als de auteur een voorbeeld situatie in detail beschrijft. Over het algemeen echt een aanrader voor met name (creatieve) ondernemers.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great book filled with stories, anecdotes but most importantly very practical ideas and experiences that coyld be applied to one's business and management. loved it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A great book for anyone who is starting a company, works in agencies, or otherwise interfaces with creative teams.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a must read for anyone doing creative work.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read this for Mark Zuckerberg’s book club, A Year Of Books. I love Pixar movies and I’m a business student grad, so Creativity, Inc was really appealing to me because it tells the history of Pixar and explains how they do business. There is a lot of great advice in the book for companies (mostly creative companies but really all kinds of businesses could learn a thing or two from this book) and just overall has a good lesson for people in general. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, being candid is important, change is good and typical hierarchy needs to be challenged. I felt Ed Catmull was frank about his experiences and was just honest about how he felt when he was new at managing people. The book goes over the same themes in different situations showing how they continued to help Pixar, it can feel a bit repetitive, but it serves a good purpose to show how what made Pixar work continues to make them work.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A delightful surprise. As I started reading, I thought it would be typical management-speak. But I found myself jotting down little notes, ideas, phrases on many pages. Even though the author says he hates little sound bite aphorisms, he creates them constantly: "People who take on complicated projects become lost at some point in the process." and "Essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new." He also admits how managing a business and culture is hard - and answers aren't found in the aphorisms. I found that refreshing, as did I find his approach - that he's always on the lookout for the next crisis. This is a book that will benefit a re-reader.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ed Catmull is, for those who don't recognise the name, one of the founders of Pixar and it's current president. Initially a computer scientist, he was pretty famous within the graphics and comp. sci. community long before he became involved in the film industry. Indeed Pixar itself grew up out of producing rendering software and hardware for Lucasfilm and later Disney. Of course, things changed.
Pixar is justifiably famous for it's technological innovation, and Dr Catmull, as the primary developer for the Renderman software, is owed a good part of that reputation. But that's not what this book is about. In fact, I'm not sure Renderman is even mentioned by name.
Instead what this book is about, is how a scientist, fresh out of a academic research, found himself managing a company. And not just a company, but a creative company full of people with wildly different competencies far outside his own. Another thing Pixar is famous for is that it is a fabulous place to work, perhaps the dream employer for anyone involved in animation or movies. Despite the managements inexperience in the beginning, clearly they got it right, building a company with a unique and identifiable culture that manages to keep the shareholders satisfied, the customers delighted and the employees dedicated. In fact they got it so right that when Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, they put the Catmull/Lasseter team in charge of Disney's other animation studios as well.
As such, this is a cross between a management manual, a managers memoir and a biography of a company, and surprisingly enough, it manages all three, with caveats.
Personally, having read more than my share of academic organisational psychology textbooks over the past couple of years, I found this book to be a distillation of how, in practice, all the very things that current OP best practices recommend can be implemented in reality. In fact, it could have pretty much replaced some of those textbooks, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Full review posted @Booklikes - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great narration. Ed's storytelling about the creative process and the realities of it is as clear as it gets! I hear a lot from individuals and companies about their desire to be "innovative" or "creative" but the reality is that those two things also come with many failures and a lot of time that is seemingly wasted. This book does great at changing that perspective, and is wonder to listen to. Whether you want to learn to manage creative teams better, or just listen to a great story about Pixar, I say this is a must read!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There are many exercises and techniques I want to incorporate into my classroom and school atmosphere as a music teacher. It's nice to be reminded to not go for easy, but go for excellence.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fantastic book. I picked this book up with an expectation of insights into the creative process. This book is, however, all about leadership and the management needed to enshrining the spirit of keeping this creative process thriving. A very touching chapter on Steve Jobs. Also, a founders narrative of Pixar w/h historical events and origin story sprinkled in. Highly recommend this as a leadership and management book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Worth the read. This was very inspiring to listen to.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great book that encourage creativity and give a good reference to the history of Pixar
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ed Catmull's "Creativity, Inc." is one part company history, one part memoir, and one part leadership lesson. Normally that might be a recipe for disaster, but when the author is a founder and president of Pixar Animation the results are an insightful look at how to organize and manage in such a way as to unlock people's creativity, energy, and passion.Catmull is unflinchingly honest about both the successes and failures of Pixar. This lends great credibility to his management insights since they are born of real-world experience and the pain of experimentation and discovery. Catmull is adamant that failure is not necessarily a setback and, coupled with an expectation of honesty and candor when working with peers, this conviction serves as the backbone of how he has run Pixar.A special note should be made of the epilogue in which Catmull reminisces about his years of collaboration with Steve Jobs. Catmull paints a moving and personal picture of the legendary CEO -- one that is at odds with the public perception of a cold, calculating leader. It's a wonderful tribute that also underscores the advice he gives in the book."Creativity, Inc." is a great read for managers and leaders, especially in fields that require agility and creativity, and would benefit anyone looking for ways to lead with integrity.Disclaimer: I received a free pre-publication copy of this book from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nearly all the books and articles published on management and business are complete garbage. They just recite trite abstract concepts as if they're something novel, in order to sell a book.Although there's perhaps a little too much autobiographical background in the first couple of chapters, Creativity, Inc. is fantastic.Creativity, Inc. is quite simply the most useful and enlightening book concerning management I have ever read. I was aware of Ed Catmull and several of his colleagues (e.g. Alvy Ray Smith) from their early CG innovations at Utah State, and of course was well aware of the magic coming from Lucasfilm. So I've been a fan of Pixar all along, but had no inkling that it was being managed so intelligently. Catmull describes in fascinating detail many of the tribulations that he and Pixar overcame in the continually improving companies he leads (he also is now President of Disney Animation). I have never yet worked with a manager at any level in any organization that has even a tenth of the ability that Catmull and his creative right hand John Lasseter have.As a side benefit of reading the book, I also came to understand Steve Jobs far better than before, and gain an appreciation for his accomplishments, capabilities and humanity. I was an Apple owner from the Apple II days and had a generally negative opinion of Steve from his huge ego and brusque habits. Catmull and Lasseter though had worked with Steve Jobs for over 20 years so many anecdotes and heartfelt narratives filled out large gaps for me.