Why It Ranks #46
The definitive book on managing creative teams. Catmull reveals the specific systems and cultural practices that made Pixar the most consistently excellent creative company in history. Every leader who manages knowledge workers should read this.
The Review
Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and led the company through an unbroken string of critically and commercially successful films — Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, Inside Out. Creativity, Inc. is his account of how he built and sustained a creative culture that consistently produced excellence at industrial scale.
The book's central insight is that every Pixar movie starts out terrible. 'Early on, all of our movies suck,' Catmull writes. The difference between Pixar and other studios is not that Pixar hires better people or has better ideas — it is that Pixar has built systems (the Braintrust, Notes Day, postmortems) that allow them to iterate honestly and relentlessly until the movie is great. This is the most practical book ever written about building a culture that does not kill creativity.
Key Takeaways
- 1Every creative project starts out terrible — the process of making it great is what matters
- 2The Braintrust: a group of trusted peers who give candid feedback with no authority to mandate changes
- 3Fear of failure prevents people from taking the risks that lead to breakthroughs
- 4Protect the new — early ideas are ugly and fragile and need a safe environment to develop
Fun Facts
- •Catmull earned one of the first-ever PhDs in computer science focused on computer graphics
- •Pixar was originally a hardware company — Jobs nearly shut it down before Toy Story saved it
- •The Braintrust has no hierarchy — junior animators can challenge senior directors
- •Catmull kept a list of every problem that almost killed a Pixar movie — it is dozens of pages long
Book Details
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace
Pages
368
Goodreads Rating
4.22/5
Copies Sold
2M+
First Published
2014
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