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

by Ed Catmull

The animators who work here are free to—no, encouraged to—decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish.

My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in. My aim at Pixar—and at Disney Animation, which my longtime partner John Lasseter and I have also led since the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar in 2006—has been to enable our people to do their best work. 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.

The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process.

One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and the PDF file format, among other things.

After receiving my Ph.D. in 1974, I left Utah with a nice little list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal.

I had conflicting feelings when I met Alvy because, frankly, he seemed more qualified to lead the lab than I was. I can still remember the uneasiness in my gut, that instinctual twinge spurred by a potential threat: This, I thought, could be the guy who takes my job one day. I hired him anyway.

When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.

Now, suddenly, I saw the way. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

My willingness to do this reflected my world-view, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it.

Skinny and bearded, in our early thirties, we both wore glasses, worked with a blinders-on intensity, and had a tendency to talk only when we had something to say.

They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable.

He not only planned to displace me in the day-to-day management of the company, he expected me to think it was a great idea!

Steve was hard-charging—relentless, even—but a conversation with him took you places you didn’t expect. It forced you not just to defend but also to engage. And that in itself, I came to believe, had value.

Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he had grabbed control of the meeting. This would be the kind of strategic, aggressive play that would define Steve’s stewardship of Pixar for years to come—once we joined forces, he became our protector, as fierce on our behalf as he was on

Dick Levin’s Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early, and Pay Late: The Manager’s Guide to Financial Survival, a

poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it. Watching

I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions—do this, not that—because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job.

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. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

This was where our true passion resided, and the only option left was to go after it with everything we had.

They followed thier passion and abandoned hardwqre

Microsoft was willing to go to $90 million, then we must be worth hanging on to.

At that point in his life, he was simply unable to put himself in other people’s shoes, and his sense of

humor was nonexistent. At Pixar, we have always had a pretty deep bench of jokesters and a core belief in having fun, but everything we tried with Steve fell painfully flat.

How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood.

was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning.

People seemed to walk a little taller, they were so proud of what we’d done.

But in this case, we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.

But one thing could not have been more plain: Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture—one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became—wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.

“Trust the Process.”

Righting this ship would require all hands on deck.

But I also believed that the alternative—acceptance of mediocrity—would have consequences that were far more destructive.

While Woody would choose Andy in the end, he would make that choice with the awareness that doing so guaranteed future sadness. “I can’t stop Andy from growing up,” he tells Stinky Pete the Prospector. “But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

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.

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

“Story Is King” and “Trust the Process”

We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste.

“Trust the Process” has meaning—they see it as code for “Keep on going, even when things look bleak.” When we trust the process, they argue, we can relax, let go, take a flyer on something radical.

Mistakes are part of creativity. But when we did, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change.

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.

Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.

Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.

After the release of Toy Story 2, our production slate expanded rapidly. Suddenly, we had several projects going at once, which meant that we couldn’t have the same five people working exclusively on every film. We were not a little startup anymore. Pete was off working on Monsters, Inc., Andrew had started Finding Nemo, and Brad Bird had joined us to begin work on The Incredibles.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. 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.

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candor is only valuable if the person on the receiving end is open to it and willing, if necessary, to let go of things that don’t work.

A lively debate in a Braintrust meeting is not being waged in the hopes of any one person winning the day. To the extent there is “argument,” it seeks only to excavate the truth.

That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive.

good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem.

good note doesn’t make demands; it doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. “I’m writhing with boredom,” is not a good note.