Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

by Ed Catmull

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.

If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too.

these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

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 creative—whatever form that creativity takes—and that to encourage such development is a noble thing.

blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company.

believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear.

successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

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

Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position. At our long, skinny table, comfortable in our middle seats, we had utterly failed to recognize that we were behaving contrary to that basic tenet.

the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t,

be creative not only technically but also in the ways that we worked together.

He naïvely thought that computers would soon replace people, and leading that charge was what excited him. (We knew this was a misconception, if a common one at that point, but we were grateful for his eagerness to fund our work.)

Hahah. This is funny!

To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away.