Creativity, Inc.

One-line takeaway

The quality of any creative work hinges on how well a company protects its employees.

Short summary

This is one of the best books I’ve read on creative leadership and organizational culture. In many ways, it reminded me of Bob Iger’s memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime.

Creativity, Inc. explains how Ed Catmull and his colleagues built Pixar’s creative culture, from its technical origins through Toy Story, Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, and the later challenges of keeping up with their success.

The book explains how candor, failure, creative feedback loops, and management practices were all essential for protecting the creative process.

This book is organized into four sections—Getting Started, Protecting the New, Building and Sustaining, and Testing What We Know. It is no memoir, but in order to understand the mistakes we made, the lessons we learned, and the ways we learned from them, it necessarily delves at times into my own history and that of Pixar.

This book isn’t just for Pixar people, entertainment executives, or animators. It is for anyone who wants to work in an environment that fosters creativity and problem solving.

What the book is about?

Creativity as a collective practice

Creativity, Inc. is Ed Catmull’s account of how Pixar tried to build an organization where creative work could survive pressure, hierarchy, fear, and most of all, the success itself.

As Pixar’s co-founder and former president, Catmull is not writing as an outside observer; he is writing as someone who helped build the company, watched it succeed, and then had to face all the harder problems of keeping that success from becoming its own obstacle.

Throughout the book, Catmull returns to the idea that creativity does not, and should not, come from a single visionary figure, no matter how brilliant that person may be. Creative work depends on people, systems, trust, and the willingness to tell the truth before the work is finished.

He says:

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

The race to the first computer-animated feature

Armed with this conviction, Catmull focused his attention on a single task: to make the first computer-animated feature film.

He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Utah in 1974, then moved through NYIT and Lucasfilm as computer graphics slowly became technically possible.

In 1979, George Lucas recruited Catmull to lead Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, which worked on digital editing, sound, printing, and computer graphics for film.

In 1986, after his departure from Apple, Steve Jobs bought the Computer Division from Lucasfilm and established Pixar as an independent company.

That same year, Pixar and Disney began their collaboration on CAPS, the Computer Animation Production System, which was designed to help Disney produce traditional animation digitally.

Toy Story

Toy Story was released in 1995, nine years after Pixar was founded, and became the first full-length computer-animated feature film.

Now that the long dry spell at Pixar was over, the type of problems the team had to deal with changed too.

After that success, Catmull’s attention circles back from achieving the technical dream to protecting the culture that made this success possible in the first place.

A significant part of the book is dedicated to explaining this challenge, and how to go about it. Catmull writes about candid feedback, balancing team hierarchies and open and unrestricted communication throughout the whole organization.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be

Catmull points out that the success of Toy Story, to some extent, became a burden for future projects. In that sense, success created its own invisible barriers: filled with distorted communication and overconfidence.

He points to the next movie in line, Toy Story 2, as the clearest example of this.

Toy Story 2 was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus—a motivated, workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline—could destroy itself if left unchecked. Though I was immensely proud of what we had accomplished, I vowed that we would never make a film that way again. It was management’s job to take the long view, to intervene and protect our people from their willingness to pursue excellence at all costs. Not to do so would be irresponsible.

The unique culture at Pixar

Next, Catmull talks about how he and the team learned from these mistakes and moved forward.

He explains how failure is—by default—built into creative work. Early versions of films are almost always incomplete, scattered, or structurally weak before repeated feedback and revision improve them.

The most interesting parts of the book, I find, are the problem-solving practices Catmull introduces when something breaks down in a creative environment. Some of them are:

Braintrust meetings: These are meetings where people review unfinished work and give direct feedback without holding back. Catmull valued these meetings, but Steve Jobs did not attend them because his presence could have made people less candid.

Candor: This is the habit of saying what you actually see in someone else’s work, clearly, honestly and respectfully, before the problem becomes harder to fix.

Hierarchy in the room: Even the Pixar conference table became a problem. It placed the most important people at the center, made eye contact difficult, and reinforced the hierarchy Pixar was trying to avoid. So, they made a point to get rid of it.

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.

Disney + Pixar

In 2006, Disney acquired Pixar, and Catmull and John Lasseter took leadership roles across Pixar and Disney Animation.

This transition turns the book’s ideas into a larger test of whether Pixar’s culture could shine beyond Pixar.

In the later part of the book, Catmull talks about how he tried to preserve Pixar’s creative principles while also helping Disney Animation recover its own identity.

And, by most visible measures, Catmull helped do exactly that.

The years that followed produced a strong run of animated films across both studios, including Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Inside Out, and Coco from Pixar, and Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, and Encanto from Disney Animation.

Key ideas & takeaways

Braintrust meetings

One of the most interesting, and probably most talked-about, ideas in the entire book is the Braintrust meeting.

Catmull describes its essential ingredients as “frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love.”

But at a practical level, these meetings are unique in their looseness. People are allowed to interrupt, disagree, challenge, and talk over each other.

That sounds chaotic, but Catmull points out that this is the whole point of the Braintrust: to let people open up, take a stance, speak freely, and push the work toward its best possible version.

The hardest part, I think, may have been getting everyone to agree that this kind of honest and messy space was allowed.

And as Catmull mentions more than once, these meetings became one of the most important reasons for Pixar’s success.

I’ll admit that there have been times when outsiders think they’ve witnessed a heated argument or even some kind of intervention. They haven’t—though I understand their confusion, which stems from their inability (after such a brief visit) to grasp the Braintrust’s intent. A lively debate in a Braintrust meeting is not being waged in the hopes of any one person winning the day. To the extent there is “argument,” it seeks only to excavate the truth.

That is part of the reason why Steve Jobs didn’t come to Braintrust meetings at Pixar—a mutually agreed prohibition, based on my belief that his bigger-than-life presence would make it harder to be candid.

Four steps for protecting a good idea

Catmull talks about how to protect the creative process from uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot clearly see, at least not in the moment. In particular, he says this responsibility falls heavily on managers. It is up to them to create the conditions where creative work can survive its early, fragile stages.

There are 4 steps to this process:

1. Make room for what you do not know.
   The best managers do not pretend to have complete control or complete understanding. They leave room for uncertainty, because that is where breakthroughs would most often happen.
2. Loosen the controls.
   Creative work cannot grow under too much control. Managers have to resist the instinct to tighten everything when things become unclear.
3. Accept risk and trust people.
   Catmull keeps returning to this idea throughout the book. If people are doing creative work, they need enough trust and freedom to try things out on their own.
4. Pay attention to fear.
   Fear can damage creative work. It keeps people from speaking honestly, taking risks, or admitting when something is not working. A manager’s job is to notice that fear and clear the path around it.

Hire the person who might be better than you

One of the best lessons in the book is that good management means being comfortable living with private discomfort. Catmull describes meeting Alvy Ray Smith and realizing that Alvy might be more qualified to lead Pixar’s operations than he was. The instinctive response would have been to protect himself, to not hire him.

But he did anyway.

This decision, Catmull says, became a turning point, because it taught him that the fear of being replaced was less important than the possibility of building something extraordinary with someone exceptionally skilled, even more skilled than you.

Since then, he says, hiring people smarter than himself has always been the goal.

Though this is a simple and straightforward point, it’s difficult to execute in practice. Nonetheless, the outcome of such an approach is far too valuable to ignore: if you want to build a creative organization, you cannot keep surrounding yourself with people who just make you feel safe. The work is larger than you, or any other individual. You have to make room for people whose ability stretches the work beyond what you could have done alone.

I had conflicting feelings when I met Alvy because, frankly, he seemed more qualified to lead the lab than I was. I can still remember the uneasiness in my gut, that instinctual twinge spurred by a potential threat: This, I thought, could be the guy who takes my job one day. I hired him anyway

Alvy would become one of my closest friends and most trusted collaborators. And ever since, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. The obvious payoffs of exceptional people are that they innovate, excel, and generally make your company—and, by extension, you—look good. But there is another, less obvious, payoff that only occurred to me in retrospect. The act of hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it. By hiring Alvy, I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward—a brilliant, committed teammate.

Steve Jobs and his contribution to Pixar’s success

Catmull’s portrait of Steve Jobs is somewhat ambivalent, in that he does not turn Jobs into a simple genius figure. He shows both sides at once: the brilliance, the intensity, the ability to understand hard problems quickly, and also the dismissiveness, the lack of empathy, and the difficulty of working with him in those early years. Of course, Pixar needed Jobs, but Catmull is clear that needing someone does not make that person easy to work with.

What makes the story more interesting is that Pixar also became part of Jobs’s own identity change. After being pushed out of Apple, Jobs came to Pixar looking for a new challenge, and over time, failure seemed to make him more patient, more thoughtful, and more willing to listen. Catmull and Jobs slowly found a way to work together through argument, repetition, persistence, and eventually trust. Jobs did not always agree, as Catmull mentions more than once, but he respected conviction. If someone believed strongly enough in an idea and kept returning to it, he was willing to let that belief stand.

Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him.

A funny thing happened, though, as we went through these trials. Steve and I gradually found a way to work together. And as we did so, we began to understand each other. You’ll recall the question I asked Steve just before he bought Pixar: How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood. The irony was that this soon became the technique I used with Steve. When we disagreed, I would state my case, but since Steve could think much faster than I could, he would often shoot down my arguments. So I’d wait a week, marshal my thoughts, and then come back and explain it again. He might dismiss my points again, but I would keep coming back until one of three things happened: (1) He would say “Oh, okay, I get it” and give me what I needed; (2) I’d see that he was right and stop lobbying; or (3) our debate would be inconclusive, in which case I’d just go ahead and do what I had proposed in the first place. Each outcome was equally likely, but when this third option occurred, Steve never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel, it couldn’t be all wrong.

Candor

Catmull makes an important distinction between honesty and candor. Everyone agrees, at least in principle, that people should be honest. But in a workplace, people often hold back for understandable reasons. They do not want to embarrass someone, especially a superior, damage a relationship, sound difficult and putting themselves at risk.

This is why Catmull prefers the word candor. It removes some of the moral weight from honesty and makes any problem easier to talk about. The issue is not that people are dishonest, but that they are often afraid to say what they really notice. In a creative organization, this is dangerous, because unfinished work needs clear feedback before it goes into production. Candor, Catmull says, is the practice of making that kind of truth-telling possible without turning a logical argument into a personal attack.

Ask anyone, “Should people be honest?” and of course their answer will be yes. It has to be! Saying no is to endorse dishonesty, which is like coming out against literacy or childhood nutrition—it sounds like a moral transgression. But the fact is, there are often good reasons not to be honest.

One way to do that is to replace the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor. Candor is forthrightness or frankness—not so different from honesty, really. And yet, in common usage, the word communicates not just truth-telling but a lack of reserve.

Highlights

The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it’s a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job. It’s not just lines on paper anymore; it’s a living, feeling entity.

Another of his favorite analogies was that building a company was like being on a wagon train headed west. On the long journey to the land of plenty, the pioneers would be full of purpose and united by the goal of reaching their destination. Once they arrived, he’d say, people would come and go, and that was as it should be. But the process of moving toward something—of having not yet arrived—was what he idealized.

Andrew Stanton told me later that he worried from the outset about how isolated the project’s crew was, even though it was by design. We were so enamored, he felt, of the possibilities of reinventing the wheel that we underestimated the impact of making so many changes at once. It was as if we’d picked four talented musicians, left them to their own devices, and hoped like hell they’d figure out how to be the Beatles.

There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

Before we get to the forces that shape that discussion, let’s take a moment to look at things from the filmmakers’ point of view. To a one, they regard these sessions as essential. Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others.

While experimentation is scary to many, I would argue that we should be far more terrified of the opposite approach. Being too risk-averse causes many companies to stop innovating and to reject new ideas, which is the first step on the path to irrelevance. Probably more companies hit the skids for this reason than because they dared to push boundaries and take risks—and, yes, to fail. To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.

How the book changed the way I think

Of the many ideas I took from this book, the one that struck me most is this: “To make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others.”