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

Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace · 8 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace.
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Amazon Summary
From a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios—the Academy Award–winning studio behind Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story —comes an incisive book about creativity in business and leadership for readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Huffington Post • Financial Times • Success • Inc. • Library Journal Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, WALL-E, and Inside Out, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his co-founding Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on leadership and management philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
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Not sure if these count as textbooks by most peoples measures, but they have been textbooks for me.

[1]Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

[2]The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World’s #1 Company

[3]Guerilla Marketing

[4]The Lords of Strategy

[5]Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

[6] The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

[7]The Deming Management Method

[8]Creativity Inc.

[9]The Wisdom of Teams

[10]On Communication

[11]On Managing Yourself

[12]The Art of Facilitation

[13]Death by Meeting

[14]Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning

[15]Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

1. https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Fac... 2. https://www.amazon.ca/Wal-Mart-Triumph-Inside-Worlds-Company... 3. https://www.amazon.com/Guerilla-Marketing-Inexpensive-Strate... 4. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591397820?ref_=cm_sw_r_awd... 5. http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Revise... 6. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000079XXQ 7. http://www.amazon.com/Deming-Management-Method-Mary-Walton/d... 8. https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Insp... 9. https://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Teams-High-Performance-Org... 10. https://www.amazon.com/Communication-featured-Necessary-Pers... 11. https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Yourself-Measure-Clayton-Chr... 12. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Facilitation-Essentials-Meetings-... 13. https://www.amazon.com/Death-Meeting-Leadership-Solving-Busi... 14. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Meani... 15. https://www.amazon.com/Makers-Takers-Finance-American-Busine...

⬐ swagatkonchada
love this list
⬐ minhazm423
How have these books changed your life?

How did you even begin to make this list? Out of how many books have you listed these 15? How have you applied the knowledge from these books?

Some of these are not particularly information dense, or technical guides, so why do you consider them bibles for you?

On the general "Creativity" industry (with a focus on animation, but it applies to many similar ones): https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Insp...

Written by the president of Pixar, and contains many anecdotes about Pixar, and challenges of animation and general creative work.

That Grove book is on my TODO list. Thanks for the reminder. As real leadership / management books go, I thought Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull was both interesting and entertaining.

https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Insp...

⬐
Dec 12, 2016 · rl3 on YC's Winter Reading List
> Creativity, Inc.

“Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, on how they built a culture of openness, honesty, self-reflection, and risk-taking that protects new ideas and creativity instead of squashing them.” –Aaron Epstein

I wonder if it comes with any helpful pointers on how to execute long-term, systematic wage-fixing[0] schemes.

The top one-star review[1] on Amazon sums it up nicely.

[0] http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage-...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/0812993012/R1CW8GBYEH3UQ...

Here are some great books for that:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Facilitation-Essentials-Meetings-... https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Insp... https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fab... https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Fac... https://www.amazon.com/Communication-featured-Necessary-Pers...

I am reading / listening to Pixar Founder Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc" which is utterly brilliant and based around this topic too - and his take is that so much of these rules are platitudes. The four mentioned in this article are close but still feel like platitudes. I would check out Catmull's book if this post interested you.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0812993012/

If at all interested please check out http://Blog.paul-Brian.com - I am posting ideas as I listen but will try to carve something real - it is well worth your time and money getting the book / audible version. Highly recommended

Honestly I Would try and make intelligent comments on the post - but the book is far better and needs a lot of foundation laying before we get onto a sensible discussion.

⬐ gjmveloso
Thanks for the feedback. I've already added the book you've mentioned on my wish list. Hope to read it soon.
Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar, wrote a great book about building and running creative businesses in general, and Pixar in particular[1]. Well worth a read.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspi...

Try taking power away from the reviewer to disarm the defense reaction. In Ed Catmul's Creativity, Inc.

(http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0812993012/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...)

he describes the Pixar "brain trust" which reviews early progress on movies with the director. They found directors would get defensive if they felt someone more powerful was telling them to make specific changes. Once they set some rules like "the director decides what, if anything gets changed" and "talk about what's not working but don't solve the problem for the director" things improved. Now instead of film veterans telling you your movie (code) stinks it becomes about opportunities to make things awesome.

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