Lots of good ideas here. Would have been better without being limited by the white male perspective--all the talk about Lassester helping to create this great culture is totally undermined by my knowledge that he was a lecherous creep and sexual harasser. ( )

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration tackles Pixar and Disney from the view of technology, individuality, and artistry. All while creating a viable business.

As a graphic designer, we balance creativity and responsibility. Like Pixar, we’re in the business of bottling and selling our imaginations.

Ed Catmull, the computer scientist who became president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, deals with this awesome collision of seemingly conflicting interests with sincerity right out of Wall-E.

I’m a huge pop culture fanatic: My friends would do trivia and one night they turned in a guess before I even heard the question figuring no one would know the answer. I felt shocked to learn that no one else knew who played Robin in the old Adam West version of Batman. It was Burt Ward, people. Burt Ward. Do people not know this?

So as you can imagine, I’ve laughed and cried with Pixar in the theatre over the years. Remember in Toy Story 3 when Woody and friends held hands and resigned themselves to incineration? You have no soul if that didn’t rock you to the core.

You'll love to hear the story of how creativity and business collided to make Disney magic. ( )

An incredibly enlightening read about the management of a creative business. Worth its grains of salt - given how the author was guilty of wage fixing schemes - but still inspiring. ( )

Creativity, Inc. is probably a book you'll get the most out of if you're one of two things: 1) creative or 2) a manager. If you're not a manager of creative people, and you're not creative yourself (or at least open to it), a lot of this will probably read like foolishness. This book is mainly 40% Pixar history mixed with 60% managerial advice written slightly clinically (but I'm not sure there's another way to write business advice).

There's a lot of good quotes in here about creativity and the way to approach a creative problem. I noted a few below, but there's a lot more. If you're working through a particularly hairy creative problem, you could do a lot worse than skimming this book for some inspiration.

Unexpectedly, this book did nuance the change Steve Jobs had over the last two decades of his life. As Becoming Steve Jobs argues that Jobs learned how to be a successful manager by looking at Pixar (and by extension, Ed Catmull, the author of this book), Catmull allows Pixar may have contributed, but shades the argument with his marriage to his wife and his relationship with his children. And as Pixar's films so often seem to deal with the transition of childhood into something deeper and more adult (not always with a loss of innocence), this seems particularly appropriate.

If I was underlining in this book (I can't, it's a library book), I would have underlined…

- ...it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who compliment each other.

- Too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them.

- Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself. Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products.

- As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization—be it an animation studio or a record label—is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.

- “I often daydream of running away. I have lots of daydreams about getting marooned on a tropical island or walking alone across America. I think we can all relate to the idea of wanting to get away from everything. ” - Pete Docter

- Creativity [is] ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.'

- The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response.

- We begin life, as children, being open to the ideas of others because we need to be open to learn. Most of what children encounter, after all, are things they’ve never seen before. The child has no choice but to embrace the new.

- ...creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle.

- If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. ( )

Ed Catmull offers insight into Pixar, how it started, and how they keep creativity alive. It examines their acquisition by Disney, and how they ensured this corporate giant did not stifle their inventive methods. One of the primary lessons is that fear is the biggest inhibitor of creativity. It also includes fascinating anecdotes about how some of their movies transformed, often significantly, between concept and release.

It includes a brief history of the quality movement, going back in time to Deming. Some of these ideas will be familiar, especially to management consultants or those involved in change management; however, there is enough unique material to be worth reading. As a side note, Steve Jobs played a key role in initiating Pixar, and Catmull offers a different perspective on Jobs, almost attempting to redeem him as a likeable, or at least more understandable, guy. ( )