Author
Amy Wallace
The journalist who turned Ed Catmull's decades at Pixar into Creativity, Inc., a candid manual for protecting creative work.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Amy Wallace is an American journalist whose career has been built on long-form reporting. She worked as a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and has written for national magazines, including Wired, where she has been a longtime contributor. Her work centres on profiles and in-depth features: people, the institutions they build, and the pressures that bend both.
In 2014 she co-wrote Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration with Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and later president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. The book is told in Catmull's first-person voice. Wallace's task was to shape decades of his experience into one coherent narrative, from early computer-graphics research to the making of Toy Story and the years after Pixar joined Disney. An expanded edition followed in 2023.
The book became a standard reference on creative leadership well beyond animation. It gave managers in many industries a shared vocabulary for practices Pixar had developed internally. The best known are the Braintrust, a room of peers who give a film's director candid notes, and the conviction that early ideas are fragile 'ugly babies' that need protection before they can be judged.
The signature
Wallace brings a reporter's discipline to a management book. Principles are rarely stated in the abstract. Each one is anchored in a specific episode: a troubled production, a tense meeting, a decision that went wrong. The reader sees the reasoning under pressure before being handed the lesson. Failures stay in the text rather than being edited into success stories, and that honesty is much of why the book is trusted.
Her method as a collaborator is restraint. Her own voice recedes so that Catmull's way of thinking stays visible. That includes his doubts, his revisions and his habit of looking for the hidden problem behind a visible one. The structure serves practical use. Stories lead to principles, and the book closes with a distilled set of 'Starting Points' for managing a creative culture, so the narrative ends as something a reader can act on.