Life Cliff Notes: Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull)

Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and an “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.
Catmull and his colleagues built a culture 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.
Without further ado, here are some of my favorite takeaways (Cliff Notes) from the book:
What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshall all of our energies to solve it.
It is for anyone who want to work in environment that fosters creativity and problem solving. My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in. The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process.
This book, then, is about the ongoing work of paying attention-of leading by being self-aware, as managers and as companies. It is an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.
Pages x-xvi
To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds.
I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because naïvely thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure-assigning a bunch of managers to report to me- I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure-in which giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us to make some significant technological leaps in a short time.
Pages 23–24
The resulting environment felt as protected as an academic institution- an idea that would stay with me and help shape what I would later try to build at Pixar. Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of a for-profit enterprise was definitely in the air.
“Pixer” “to make pictures” Pixer + radar = Pixar!
Simply put, managing was hard. No one took me aside to give me tips. The books I read that promised insight on the topic were key.
“Do, or do not. There is no try,”
“We’re still going to get there,” he would say. “Grab the paddles and let’s keep going!”
Pages 29-32
The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line.
Page 50
Juxo Jr., a short film directed by John starring the lamp that is now the pixar logo.
Page 52
The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they mismatched.
To reiterate, it is the focus on people-their work habits, their talents, their values-that is absolutely central to any creative venture.
If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of our selves, support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling lives outside of work.
Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike but also by making it easier for them to achieve.
We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It just tool-a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals.
Page 74–78
Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another. People who would feel obligated to be honest somehow feel freer when asked for their candor; they have a choice about whether to give it, and thus, when they do give it, it tends to be genuine. The Braintrust is one of the most important traditions at Pixar.
Page 87
The more people there are in the room, the more pressure there is to perform well.
Page 89
In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.
If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make.
Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them.
What I want to do is loosen its grip on us.
Page 111
When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work-even when it is confounding them.
The principle I’m describing here-iterative trial and error-has long-recognized value in science. When scientists have a question, they construct hypotheses, test them, analyze them, a draw conclusions-and then they do it all over again.
Experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding.
The overplanners just take longer to be wrong.
The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it.
Page 113–114
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 irrelevance.
To be truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.
Page 118
Leaders must demonstrate their trust-worthiness, over time, through their actions-and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure.
Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
Page 125
Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason-our job is to find the reason and to remedy it management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
Page 128
We must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions-our goals as we learn, striving to get it right-not necessarily to get it right the first time.
Essential to creativity: culture that protects the new.
Page 140
When people who run bureaucracies balk at change, they are usually acting in the service of what they think is right. Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to deal with real abuses, problems, or inconsistencies or as a way of managing complex environments. But while each rule may have been instituted for good reason, after a while a thicket of rules develops that may not make sense in the aggregate. The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.
Page 154
While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.
Invigorated by uncertainty.
Pages183–1844
The Hidden-and our acknowledgement of it-is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success.
Page 185
Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them-and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes safe to try something that may fail.
Creativity is more like a marathon than a spring. You have to pace yourself.
That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands.
Page 222–224
That’s what Steve, John, and I ultimately bonded over: Passion for excellence-a passion so ardent we were willing to argue and struggle and stay together, even when things got extremely uncomfortable.
Page 299
THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE
· Always try to hire people who are smarter than you.
· If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose.
· Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process.
· Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.
· Changing and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
· Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often.
Pages 316-318
