Top Thoughts For Managing A Creative Culture At Your Startup
Overcoming Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity Inc., has been on my reading list for quite some time. But once I finally got my hands on it (thanks Ajit Verghese!) I couldn’t put it down.
Catmull has had an undying dream of changing animation since his days studying computer science at the University of Utah. He once said, “In graduate school, I’d quietly set a goal of making the first computer-animated feature film, and I’d worked tirelessly for twenty years to accomplish it.” Along his journey and relentless pursuit of storytelling, Catmull developed many partnerships with the likes of George Lucas eventually leading him to being co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, the Academy Award–winning studio behind Inside Out and Toy Story.
Creativity Inc. is about how to build a creative culture, but it’s also 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. Besides creativity, failure and change are two underlying themes throughout the book. Below are top quotes and passages that I believe can be applied to enhance the creative environment at your startup or whichever line of work you’re in:
“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
“Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.”
“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”
“If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”
“Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
“What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position — that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
“We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.”
“ Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.”
“It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.”
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions.”
“Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.”
“A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.”
“When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality — a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.”
“In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires — they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.”
“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.”
“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”
“Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched.”
“FOR MOST OF us, failure comes with baggage — a lot of baggage — that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or — worse! — aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.”
“The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal — it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.”
“Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. That’s a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so — to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck.” This idea — that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible — is a hard concept for many to grasp. But think about how easy it would be for a movie about talking toys to feel derivative, sappy, or overtly merchandise-driven. Think about how off-putting a movie about rats preparing food could be, or how risky it must’ve seemed to start WALL-E with 39 dialogue-free minutes. We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass.”
“Failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy — trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it — dooms you to fail.”
“Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly — hindsight being 20–20 and all — we often aren’t open to knowing more. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” The cat’s hindsight, in other words, distorts her view. The past should be our teacher, not our master.”
“In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve’s feeling was that Pixar’s survival could not depend solely on the performance of each and every movie. The underlying logic of his reasoning shook me: We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem — a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment.”
“Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.”
“In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise.”
“Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.”
“ In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.…”
“Turn pain into progress. To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning.”
“Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.”
“There is no growth or success without change.”
There are plenty more passages with incredible insight. I couldn’t recommend this book more so feel free to pick one up today and share it with your team. Also, if you’re interested in this book, then you might also like The Hard Thing About Hard Things by bhorowitz.
