Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Summary
This is the full-title edition of Catmull's account of building and running Pixar, and later Disney Animation, with a focus on the management problem of sustaining creative work after success. The central argument is that every Pixar film began badly and that the organisation's actual capability is the speed with which it identifies and fixes the problems. The mechanism is the Braintrust, a group of directors and story people who watch works in progress and give direct assessments with no authority to require changes, so the director retains ownership of the solutions. Catmull contrasts this with studio notes delivered by executives with power, which produce compliance rather than improvement.
His other practices include postmortems structured against the tendency to report only successes, giving anyone the authority to stop production when they see a defect, deliberately protecting new ideas while they are still fragile, and the argument that a good team fixes a weak idea while a weak team ruins a good one.
He covers the history including the Lucasfilm computer division, the relationship with Jobs, the Disney partnership and the 2006 acquisition, and the rebuilding of Toy Story 2 in nine months. His analysis of the hidden forces preventing candour includes the observation that the absence of reported problems is evidence of concealment rather than of health, and that managers must actively work to surface what people are hiding.
The book is favourable to its author and the failures described are mostly ones that were fixed. Pixar's later record and the departure of John Lasseter after misconduct allegations sit awkwardly with the culture described. The separation of feedback from authority is the transferable mechanism.
Key takeaways 8
- Every film started out bad, so the organisation's real capability is the speed with which it identifies and corrects the problems.
- Feedback works when it comes from peers with expertise and no authority to compel changes, since the maker retains ownership of the solution.
- A good team can fix a weak idea while a weak team will ruin a good one, so investment should go to people rather than to concepts.
- The absence of reported problems is evidence of concealment rather than of health, and managers must actively work to surface them.
- Anyone should be able to stop production when they see a defect, which requires that doing so carries no penalty.
- New ideas are fragile and require deliberate protection, because early-stage work cannot survive ordinary evaluation.
- Success makes an organisation more fearful of failure and therefore less able to take the risks that produced the success.
- Postmortems must be structured against the tendency to report only what went well, or they produce nothing usable.
Who should read it
Leaders of creative and product organisations who need a working mechanism for candid feedback that does not collapse into hierarchy.
About Ed Catmull
Co-founder and former president of Pixar and of Walt Disney Animation Studios; earlier a computer graphics researcher.
Creativity, Inc. sets out the specific mechanisms Pixar used to hold quality across twenty consecutive films - the Braintrust review with no authority over the director, daily work-in-progress screenings, and structured postmortems - which makes it a manual for managing work whose output cannot be specified in advance. The account of the Disney Animation turnaround shows the same practices applied to an organisation that was already failing.
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