Book Summary — Creativity Inc

Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration

You can find all my book summaries — here.

My 1 paragraph summary:

Creativity describes the challenges of keeping Pixar creative as it grows and integrates into Disney. Ed describes in lots of practical examples of how he thinks about people and processes in corporate cultures to retain and foster creativity.

Intro

They way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be a creative — whatever form that creativity takes — and that to encourage such development is a noble thing.

Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

Getting Started

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

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. Ignore the fear, take the risk. By hiring [Alvy], I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward — a brilliant, committed teammate.

Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

We decided to share our work with the outside world. My view was that we were all so far from achieving our goal that to hoard ideas only impeded our ability to get to the finish line.

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

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. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line.

You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Communication should not have to go through hierarchical channels.

Getting the team and chemistry right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.

There are inevitable periods of extreme crunch and stress, and of which can be healthy if they don’t go on too long. But the ambitions of both managers and their teams can exacerbate each other and become unhealthy. It is a leader’s responsibility to see this and guide it not exploit it.

It’s not about merely saying “be balanced” it’s about making it easier for employees to achieve that balance.

Protecting the New

Candor is forthrightness or frankness — not so different from honesty, really.

Braintrust meetings — filled with people with deep expertise, no hierarchy, the director still have full autonomy to take feedback or not, the film, not the producer is under the microscope, no selfish agenda, it’s all-seeing but benevolent

Foster a positive understanding of failure.

How?

If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them.

In a fearless culture, you will begin to see the upside of decisiveness: The time they’ve saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they’re on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot.

In many organisations, managers tend to err on the side of secrecy, of keeping things hidden from employees. I believe this is the wrong instinct. A manager’s default mode should not be secrecy. What is needed is thoughtful consideration of the cost secrecy weighed against the risks. When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can’t be trusted.

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.

New ideas — we call them ugly babies. Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.

Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on — but it is not the goal/ Making something great is the goal.

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.

I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas’.

Big companies have failed because leaders weren’t aware of blind spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist.

As my position changed, people became more careful about how they spoke and acted in my presence. I don’t think that my actions changed in a way for that prompted this; my position did. Gradually, snarky behaviour, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view — from my view, anyway. I rarely saw bad behaviour because people wouldn’t exhibit it in front of me.

Building and Sustaining

How I think about managing:

1. our models of the world so distort what we perceive that they can make it hard to see what is right in front of us
2. we don’t typically see the boundaries between new information coming in from the outside and our old, established mental models — we perceive both together, as unified experience.
3. we unknowingly get caught up in our own interpretations, we become inflexible
4. people who work or live together have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply intertwined with one another.

Here are some mechanisms we use to put our collective heads into a different from of mind:

1. Dailies, or Solving Problems Together

Dailies are there for a regular checkin and feedback. It’s constructive midstream feedback. Participants have checked their ego at the door — they are about to show incomplete work to their director and colleagues. You need to foster and create a safe place for that.

By making the struggles to solve the problems safe to discuss, then everyone learns from — and inspires — one another.

2. Research Trips

Trips to the field to observe. They are more than just trips. Because they take place early in the filmmaking process, they fuel the film’s development.

3. Power of Limits

“beautifully shaded penny” — artists care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting what some call “ the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand that you’ll never see”.

My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill-suited to the task at hand.

4. Integrating Tech and Art

A mindset we value — a mindset that doesn’t fear change. We apply this concept throughout the studio — software people rotate in and out of production.

5. Short Experiments

You should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected.

6. Learning to See

We introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software.

7. Postmortems

Meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie in which we explore what did and didn’t work and attempt to consolidate lessons learned.

Why do post-mortems?

• Consolidate what’s been learned
• Teach others who weren’t there
• Don’t let resentment fester
• Use the schedule to force reflection
• Pay it forward — arms with right questions for next time

8. Continuing to Learn

Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humped by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay.

Unmade Future

Here are some mental models which are essential to fortify and sustain anyone engaged in the hard work of inventing something new.

• “When you think you stink” you need to be super comfortable with the tools you use
• Include people in your problems, not just solutions
• People want their leaders to be confident.
• Never stop moving forward.

Testing What We Know

Don’t attack the person, attack the project.

What’s the point of hiring smart people if we don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?

In big organisations, 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 organisation.

We had learned long ago that while everyone appreciates cash bonuses, they value something else almost as much: being looked in the eye by someone they respect and told, “Thank you.” At Pixar, we’d devised a way to give our employees money and gratitude.

Like I always say when talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.

Notes Day

Day offsite of working in groups cross-department and coming up with solutions.

What made it a success:

• clear and focused goal
• idea championed by the highest level of the company
• we made it happen internally instead of hiring a consultancy

My goal was never to show people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination — it is a direction.

Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the parth for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier, But ease isn’t the goal, excellence is.

You can find all my book summaries — here.

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