Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up.The essential ingredient in that movie’s success - and in the 13 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:

Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. He nurtured that dream as a PhD 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 cofounding Pixar in 1986. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired - and so profitable.Īs a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. 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. It is, at heart, a book about creativity - but it is also, as Pixar cofounder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible”.įor nearly 20 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 30 Academy Awards. 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. Named one of the best books of the year by The Huffington Post Ĭreativity, Inc. From a cofounder 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.

Creativity inc by ed catmull