Creativity, Inc.

Creativity, Inc. is an instruction manual for instilling inspiration into employees, managers and bosses, by revealing the hidden forces that get in the way, based on over 30 years of experience of the president of Pixar, Ed Catmull.

One of the most popular and insightful quotes from the book is this one:

It’s one of those things that you’d never think of instinctively, but once you read it, you know it’s true. As long as you manage to hire talented people, who work together well and communicate freely, the ideas aren’t as important.

Imagine the character designers, storyboard writers or animators that were part of the Toy Story team had been mediocre at their job. We might never have seen a heartbroken Buzz Lightyear, who finds out he’s “just” a toy and not a real space ranger, a dramatic rescue mission to save him from the gruel hands of Sid, or a beautifully animated potato head.

Hire inspired people, then give them good ideas. Never try to do it the other way around.

Instead of being surprised by failure when it happens, the people at Pixar acknowledge it up front. They greet it right at the door. By accepting that mistakes are just part of the deal, they can design their processes to be iterative, meaning they can weed out the mistakes they find with the next project and not repeat them again, and don’t have to obsess over correcting them with the current project.

In the same vein, at Pixar mistakes are never made by individuals, only by teams. When failure happens, the entire team is responsible, and no finger is pointed at anyone in particular.

What this failure-sharing mentality leads to is that employees feel much safer in taking risks, because no one ever has to take 100% of the blame. It feels so much better to know that a major screw-up will be divided equally among five people than thinking you might be fired because of one, stupid mistake.

Another way Pixar does this is by giving people more time to explore and correct during the development stage of a film, where mistakes aren’t as costly as in actual production.

In Ed’s words:

Failure-sharing is exactly that. Only when everyone feels safe to take risks do you have an environment where everyone can have the courage to be creative.

While you should greet failure at the door, there’s one thing you should definitely hand over before you enter your building, and that’s boredom. Imagine working for a marketing agency, startup or entertainment company, where all success depends on creativity, and then having to work in one of 137 identical, lame, cold, sterile cubicles. It just doesn’t make…