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Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

By Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

"In 1986, Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar, a modest start-up with an immodest goal: to make the first-ever computer animated movie. Nine years later, Pixar released Toy Story, which went on to revolutionize the industry, gross $360 million, and establish Pixar as one of the most successful, innovative, and emulated companies on earth.

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Book Information

Publisher: Random House
Publish Date: 04/08/2014
Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780812993011
ISBN-10: 0812993012
Language: English

What We're Saying

November 12, 2014

The business and economic world's most visible book award was announced today. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

September 25, 2014

A shortlist for the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award was announced yesterday. The books chosen focus very much on the big-picture issues of the day, "the most important trends shaping our world" as the press release puts it, so the switch from Goldman Sachs to McKinsey as a partner to FT has not reduced the scope of the books as I thought it may. (I speculated back in May when the announcement was made that McKinsey would now be backing the award that it may change focus to the more nuts-and-bolts business management issues that McKinsey ostensibly focuses on in its own work. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

August 07, 2014

I speculated back in May when submissions opened for The Financial Times and McKinsey & Company 2014 Business Book of the Year Award that the books they looked at would be more focused on business nuts-and-bolts issues now that a consultancy firm (McKinsey) had taken over for an investment bank (Goldman Sachs) as the Financial Times' partner on the awards. I also thought they would not be announcing a longlist as they had in the past because it was not on their awards schedule. It seems I was wrong on both counts, because The Financial Times and McKinsey announced a longlist this morning, and the books on it are mostly big-picture books, not nut-and-bolts business and management books. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

May 21, 2015

We conclude our Thinker in Residence series with Margaret Heffernan by asking her a few questions about our bread and butter—business and books. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

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.

About the Authors

Ed Catmull is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. He has received five Academy Awards, including the Gordon E.

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Ed Catmull is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. He has been honored with five Academy Awards, including the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime achievement in the field of computer graphics, and the ACM Learn More

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