num_pages: 368
description: What does it mean to manage well?From Ed Catmull co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios comes an incisive book about creativity in businesssure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink Tom Peters and Chip and Dan Heath. Creativity Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animationinto the meetings postmortems and Braintrust sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is at heart a book about how to build a creative culturebut 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 and WALL-E 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 admiredand 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 founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later Toy Story was released changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movies successand in the thirteen movies that followedwas the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar based on 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 dont strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature you will be ill prepared to lead.  Its not the managers job to prevent risks. Its the managers 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 companys communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.  Do not assume that general agreement will lead to changeit takes substantial energy to move a group even when all are on board.
language: English
title: Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
publisher: Random House