From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios--the Academy
Award-winning studio behind Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story--comes
an incisive book about creativity in business and leadership for readers
of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Huffington Post - Financial Times - Success - Inc. -
Library Journal
Creativity, Inc. is 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
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.
As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first
computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at
the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their
start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led,
indirectly, to his co-founding Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, Toy
Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential
ingredient in that movie's success--and in the thirteen movies that
followed--was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues
built at Pixar, 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.
