Creativity, Inc.
by Ed Catmull
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or come up with something better.
Why read it
How do you keep a company producing hit after hit when every creative project starts out ugly, broken, and one bad decision away from disaster? The man who built Pixar spent his career answering that.
Catmull, Pixar's co-founder, shares the management philosophy behind decades of animated hits, arguing that protecting creativity means building a culture where problems can surface without fear. The book is a practical guide to leading creative teams, candor, and confronting the hidden forces that quietly kill good work.
Catmull, a computer scientist who co-founded Pixar and later led Disney Animation, wrote the book with Amy Wallace, publishing it in 2014. It draws on his firsthand experience through Toy Story and beyond and became a widely read management classic.
- 01
Protect the new idea
Every film starts out bad; the job is to nurture fragile early ideas rather than judge them too soon.
- 02
The Braintrust
A group of trusted peers gives candid feedback with no authority to mandate changes, keeping honesty safe.
- 03
Confront the unseen
Leaders must actively hunt for the hidden problems and fears that distort a team's decisions.
- 04
Failure as information
Treating mistakes as data rather than shame lets teams take the risks creativity requires.
Catmull recounts how Toy Story 2 was rebuilt almost from scratch in nine months after the team realized the story was not working.
He describes an early crisis when a command accidentally began deleting Toy Story 2 from the servers, and a working copy survived only because an employee had it at home.
