Failure isn't a necessary evil. In fact, it isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

Candor could not happen without trust, and trust (like candor) must be earned over time

<ul><li>Great films require both creative mastery and technical excellence.</li><li>Assemble complementary teams with diverse skills like art, animation, directing, writing and technology.</li><li>Collaboration between paradoxical abilities like mastery and beginner's mind yields breakthroughs.</li><li>Avoid silos. Value collective genius over individual brilliance. Help introverts contribute.</li><li>Build a cohesive team united by shared purpose. Diversity powers originality.</li></ul>

Assemble Diverse Cross-Functional Teams

Prototype to test assumptions faster and cheaper before committing fully. Fail early to succeed faster. Use minimum viable prototypes to validate concepts.Collect real user feedback. Refine or kill mediocre ideas before over-investing. Move forward based on evidence from prototypes.

Prototype Early and Often

Enable people to identify deeply with company purpose. Elevate work from job to mission. Connect roles to vision to motivate. Celebrate team accomplishments.Encourage ambitious organizational goals. Align rewards to team results. Build shared consciousness and commitment beyond titles.

Instil Collective Ownership

To enable candor, build trust and mutual respect first. Question ideas, not people. Reward truth-telling. Make sharing concerns safe.Authentic feedback, however brutal, aims to achieve excellence. Hear it openly, not defensively. Truth emerges through debate, not blind consensus. Hearing the truth, though hard initially, enables growth.

Speak and Hear the Truth 

<ul><li>Conduct postmortems to reflect on successes, mistakes and key learnings. Prevent recurrence of mistakes.</li><li>Maintain data integrity; record facts. Consider multiple perspectives.</li><li>Identify process improvements. Frame as a learning opportunity, not blame game. Revisit after subsequent projects to gauge effectiveness of fixes.</li></ul>

Postmortems Reveal Opportunities 

View work as never finished, just released. Maintain beginner's mindset for continuous learning.Evolve creative process constantly. Challenge status quo.Eliminate silos; enable idea cross-pollination. Compete against yourself, not others.Vulnerability and questioning lead to innovation.

Stay in Constant Beta Mode

The book Creativity, Inc. provides an inside look at Pixar Animation Studios and the leadership principles that enabled it to become one of the most creative and successful animation studios in the world. Co-founder and President Ed Catmull takes readers behind the scenes, from Pixar's early days as a small computer company to producing blockbuster hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Up.

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 Journal Creativity, 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.

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Creativity

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Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull, PhD is a computer scientist and current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, DisneyToon Studios, and Pixar Animation Studios. As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.

Ed Catmull

Amy Wallace was an American writer. She was the daughter of writers Irving Wallace and Sylvia Wallace and the sister of writer and populist historian David Wallechinsky.

ED CATMULL

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