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
JournalCreativity 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.
