Book Club Friday's (#18) - Creativity Inc. PIXAR
Creativity Inc.
About the Author
Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. He has been honoured with five Academy Awards, including the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for lifetime achievement in the field of computer graphics. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and children. He was very close friends with Steve Jobs and is very humble about his background and his skills as an executive and president of Pixar.
A little bit about the book
Creativity Inc. is a book written primarily for business tips and tricks, but it also ties in with the history of Pixar Animation. Catmull nicely uses his own personal history as well as Pixar Animations history to convey his messages of how to overcome the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration and creativity.
He is more than qualified to talk about this due to the track record of Pixar Animations. They are famous for producing incredible animated movies such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up and WALL-E all of which have come from a single source of creativity and then inspiring collaboration. The book is dedicated in a sense to Steve Jobs, who was one of the founding partners of Pixar along with Catmull and John Lasseter. Catmull is insistent that without Steve jobs funding and mentorship, there would not be a Pixar Animations, which also would have a domino effect in which all those great movies, that means so much to so many people would not have been created... The relationships formed within Pixar would not have been formed, there may not even be a Disney anymore seeing as many believe that the resurgence of Disney came through the purchasing of Pixar.
Although it is interesting and nice to hear about the fundamentals of how Pixar works, how their management is structured and why they became such a success. There are also a lot of great business applications to the book and Catmull has purposely gone with this format in order to make it easier to digest the information.
It is split into 4 parts:
I. Getting started
II. Protecting the New
III. Building and Sustaining
IV. Testing what we know
Some examples of good business knowledge in the book are things like:
how to establish your creative organization's identity,
how to pick out (as best as possible) the unseen forces that stand in the way of creativity and 'true inspiration',
the importance of extreme ownership of mistakes and leading by example,
broadening your viewpoints and always being willing to pivot and change the direction of your company if it is necessary,
getting the best out of your employees,
describing the techniques and practices that can be done in order to reinforce a company's employees creativity - such as 'Notes Day' for Pixar.
Personally, I'm not a creative guy, although I wish I naturally was it is something that I recognise that I need to develop and I can honestly say that Creativity Inc. has helped me see things in organizations and businesses that I didn't see before.
Catmull finishes the book with a wonderful extract about Steve Jobs, and the real guy that he was during the last few months of his life. How he develops as a person and became very wise as he realised that death was an inevitability for him. It was great to read this because the picture that society has painted of Steve Jobs through books such as Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' and the movie directed by Danny Boyle about three of his main product releases glorified him as this guy that never left his young, arrogant, pressurizing, driven and inconsiderate phase - the one with the reality distortion field. Whereas Catmull insists that this just wasn't a true reflection of his character in the end.
Furthermore, Catmull condenses the main points of his book into a set of principles given at the end of the book in the section called: 'Starting points: Thoughts for managing a creative culture'. This perfectly concludes the book and proves really useful as the main principles of the book are all provided in one place over a few pages.
Creativity Inc. is a book that I believe is essential reading for anyone interested in business or running a company from a startup to a fully fledged organization.
But also, it is a fun book to read about Pixar's history and what lead to the success of many of their beloved movies.
Have a great weekend, and go pick up the book!
remember:
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
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