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

by Ed Catmull

I 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.

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.

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

Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.

I like to think of the Braintrust as Pixar’s version of peer review, a forum that ensures we raise our game—not by being prescriptive but by offering candor and deep analysis.

To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can.

Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.

For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.

When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.

It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy—as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run.

Whether it’s the kernel of a movie idea or a fledgling internship program, the new needs protection.

And because they weren’t aware of these blind spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist.

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said,

Dailies are master classes in how to see and think more expansively, and their impact can be felt throughout the building.

Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.

“Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”

The goal is to learn to suspend, if only temporarily, the habits and impulses that obscure your vision.

In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.

“It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.”

• If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

• Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.