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Creativity, Inc.

an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands upon his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles used to build Pixar's singularly successful culture, including all he learned in the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve.

For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is.

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, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter. A mere nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie's success-and in the movies that followed-was 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. 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.

Creativity, Inc. has been expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. Featuring a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and new reflections at the end, this updated edition details how Catmull built a culture that doesn't just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, communication, and originality, but commits to them. Pursuing excellence isn't a one-off assignment, but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.


'Just might be the best business book ever written' Forbes Magazine
'This book should be required reading for any manager' Charles Duhigg

©2023 Ed Catmull (P)2023 Penguin Audio

 Business Development Business Development & Entrepreneurship Career Success Creativity Management Management & Leadership Motivation & Self-Improvement Personal Development Business Leadership Career Success Dream

Critic reviews

Many have attempted to formulate and categorize inspiration and creativity. What Ed Catmull shares instead is his astute experience that creativity isn’t strictly a well of ideas, but an alchemy of people. In Creativity, Inc. Ed reveals, with commonsense specificity and honesty, examples of how not to get in your own way and realize a creative coalescence of art, business and innovation.
This is best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: Making films that make them feel proud of one another.
Just might be the best business book ever written
Pixar uses technology only as a means to an end; its films are rooted in human concerns, not computer wizardry. The same can be said of Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull’s endearingly thoughtful explanation of how the studio he co-founded generated hits such as the Toy Story trilogy, Up and Wall-E. . . . [Catmull] uses Pixar’s triumphs and near-disasters to outline a system for managing people in creative businesses—one in which candid criticism is delivered sensitively, while individuality and autonomy are not strangled by a robotic corporate culture
Achieving enormous success while holding fast to the highest artistic standards is a nice trick—and Pixar, with its creative leadership and persistent commitment to innovation, has pulled it off. This book should be required reading for any manager
Steve Jobs—not a man inclined to hyperbole when asked about the qualities of others—once described Ed Catmull as ‘very wise,’ ‘very self-aware,’ ‘really thoughtful,’ ‘really, really smart,’ and possessing ‘quiet strength,’ all in a single interview. Any reader of Creativity, Inc., Catmull’s new book on the art of running creative companies, will have to agree. Catmull, president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written what just might be the most thoughtful management book ever
It’s one thing to be creative; it’s entirely another—and much more rare—to build a great and creative culture. Over more than thirty years, Ed Catmull has developed methods to root out and destroy the barriers to creativity, to marry creativity to the pursuit of excellence, and, most impressive, to sustain a culture of disciplined creativity during setbacks and success. Pixar’s unrivaled record, and the joy its films have added to our lives, gives his method the most important validation: It works
All stars
Most relevant
Loved the intertwined nature of the Pixar story and how that led to developing the processes required to build creativity

Great insights to how to engineer creativity

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It's definitely interesting - and I've found myself thinking about it and discussing, so it's clearly worthwhile. But it's long and there's a fair amount of repetition. It's narrated by the author, but he still seems to miss the cadence a few times.

Interesting but long!

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such an amazing listen with great history and insight not only into Pixar but to Disney as well. a truly great book of some innovative ideas on creativity in teams as well.

Incredible

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This is a very interesting book based on its subject Pixar Animation. The author used to be one of the directors of the studio.

I was expecting more information written for us normal people.

Don´t get me wrong, the book has lots of great stuff in it, but Catmull uses pages upon pages to rumble about business strategy and advice. Its clear that this man knows his stuff, but he also has a big ego, although Catmull tries to prove otherwise.

His biggest problem is this, he does not know when to stop. Hence the book is way too long.

Catmull also is the reader of the audiobook. A very bad choice. He sounds like a very tired old man, who can´t get the words out. This is the one sticking point that killed my interest about the book.

This book could have been so much more

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