Creativity, Inc.

The story in brief

Ed Catmull grew up wanting to be a Disney animator, became a computer scientist instead, and in the 1970s at the University of Utah did pioneering work in computer graphics. His goal was to make the first computer-animated feature film. In 1979 he joined Lucasfilm to lead its computer division, and in 1986 Steve Jobs bought the division and it became Pixar. Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first feature film made entirely by computer animation. Pixar followed it with a long run of successes, and in 2006 Disney bought the company, putting Catmull and John Lasseter in charge of both Pixar and Disney’s own animation studio. Catmull wrote Creativity, Inc., with the journalist Amy Wallace, in 2014. He received the Turing Award, computing’s highest honour, with Pat Hanrahan, for work in computer graphics.

The book is partly a memoir of Pixar and partly an account of the principles Catmull developed for managing creative people.

The decisions that made it

After Toy Story’s success, Catmull found himself asking what would come next. He had achieved his life’s goal. He decided that his new goal was to build a studio that could sustain creativity, and to find the problems that he could not see.

During the production of Toy Story 2, which began as a lower-budget sequel for video release, the film was in serious trouble. Pixar’s leaders decided, late in production, to remake much of it, at enormous cost in time and effort, rather than release something below the studio’s standard. The episode taught Catmull two things. The team’s quality, not the original plan, had to come first. And people working at an unsustainable pace, as many did on that film, could be harmed by the very commitment the studio prized. During the same production, a command accidentally deleted most of the film’s files, and the backups failed. The film was saved by a copy that a technical director had kept on a computer at home.

Catmull and his colleagues created the Braintrust, a group of the studio’s experienced directors and storytellers who met regularly to watch films in progress and give candid notes. The Braintrust had no authority. The director could accept or reject its advice. Catmull argues that removing the power to impose solutions is what made the candour safe and useful.

When Disney bought Pixar, Catmull and Lasseter chose not to merge Disney’s animation studio into Pixar but to revive it on its own terms, keeping the two studios separate and refusing to let either do the other’s work. Disney Animation went on to make Tangled, Frozen and other successes.

What the book sees in them

Catmull’s central idea is that every early version of a creative work is bad. He calls them ugly babies: awkward, unformed and vulnerable. A studio’s job is to protect them from the people and processes that would crush them, especially from the needs of what he calls the hungry beast, the organisation’s appetite for output that must be fed to keep everyone employed.

He also argues that candour is essential but difficult. People hesitate to tell the truth to those with more power, and directors become defensive about their work. The Braintrust works because its members share a commitment to the film and because notes are about the film, not the person.

He is unusual among business writers in stressing what he does not know. He argues that managers are always seeing only part of what happens in their organisations, and that hidden problems are the most dangerous. Success makes this worse, because it convinces leaders that their methods work and makes others reluctant to bring them bad news.

Finally, he treats failure as a necessary part of creativity. A studio that punishes failure will get only safe, derivative work. The aim is not to avoid failure but to make it cheap, early and instructive.

Since it was published

Catmull retired in 2019. In late 2017 John Lasseter, his long-time partner, took a leave of absence after acknowledging what he called missteps in his conduct toward employees, and he left Disney the following year. Catmull’s insistence that leaders cannot see everything that happens in their organisations gained a painful example. An expanded edition of the book, published in 2023, added a new introduction, two new chapters and postscripts covering the years since the first edition. The site’s idea page Groupthink and the Silence of Rooms discusses the conditions in which people feel unable to speak.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks how you protect new ideas while they are weak. Most organisations judge early work by the standards of finished products, and kill it. Leaders can create spaces where unfinished work is shown and improved without being judged.

It asks how you get honest feedback when you have power. Catmull’s answer, a group whose advice cannot be imposed, removes the threat that makes people hold back. Notes should be about the work.

And it asks what you are not seeing. Success hides problems. A leader who assumes there are hidden problems, and goes looking for them, is better placed than one who believes the reports.