Knowingo
The cover of Creativity, Inc.

Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace, 2014

How Pixar kept making good films: candor, a Braintrust of peers who say what is wrong, and a refusal to hide problems, told by the Pixar cofounder who ran it.

Get the app Read on the web

27 parts, about 39 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Explains how Pixar's Braintrust diagnoses problems in rough versions without prescribing fixes while the director decides, replaying one meeting after an early screening
  • Argues failure is a necessary consequence of doing something new, through a monster story reworked repeatedly and a newt film shut down yet judged worthwhile
  • Shows how Pixar's leaders remade Disney Animation after Disney bought Pixar, ending mandatory notes to directors and telling staff to solve problems without asking permission

Who it is for

  • Managers trying to build a team where people speak up candidly
  • Directors, producers and team leads guiding creative work through rough early drafts
  • Founders and executives learning to surface problems they cannot see

What the summary covers

  1. Lost and found2 min
  2. The long table1 min
  3. Becoming an animator by another road1 min
  4. Learning to manage1 min
  5. John Lasseter, then Steve Jobs2 min
  6. Running a company I did not understand1 min
  7. Steve's money, and learning to argue with him1 min
  8. Toy Story and going public1 min
  9. A problem I had missed1 min
  10. Toy Story 22 min
  11. Candor and the Braintrust1 min
  12. Inside a Braintrust meeting2 min
  13. Fear and failure2 min
  14. The Beast and the ugly baby2 min
  15. Change and randomness2 min
  16. What we cannot see2 min
  17. Broadening our view2 min
  18. Learning to see1 min
  19. Postmortems1 min
  20. Beginners again1 min
  21. Models for the unknown1 min
  22. Selling Pixar to Disney1 min
  23. Remaking Disney Animation2 min
  24. Hand drawn animation and Tangled1 min
  25. Notes Day2 min
  26. The Steve I knew2 min
  27. Starting points1 min

Recommended by

  • Charles DuhiggPulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of The Power of Habit
    Achieving enormous success while holding fast to the highest artistic standards is a nice trick—and Pixar, with its creative leadership and persistent commitment to innovation, has pulled it off. This book should be required reading for any manager.
  • Jim CollinsBusiness researcher and author of Good to Great
    Over more than thirty years, Ed Catmull has developed methods to root out and destroy the barriers to creativity, to marry creativity to the pursuit of excellence, and, most impressive, to sustain a culture of disciplined creativity during setbacks and success.
  • Seth GodinAmerican author and marketing expert
    Too often, we seek to keep the status quo working. This is a book about breaking it.
  • Gary PisanoProfessor of business administration at Harvard Business School
    The most practical and deep book ever written by a practitioner on the topic of innovation.
  • Chip HeathProfessor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business
    Business gurus love to tell stories about Pixar, but this is our first chance to hear the real story from someone who lived it and led it. Everyone interested in managing innovation—or just good managing—needs to read this book.
  • Daniel CoyleAuthor of The Talent Code
    Catmull takes us inside the Pixar ecosystem and shows how they build and refine excellence, in revelatory detail.
  • George LucasFilmmaker who created Star Wars and founded Lucasfilm
    In Creativity, Inc. Ed reveals, with commonsense specificity and honesty, examples of how not to get in your own way and how to realize a creative coalescence of art, business, and innovation.
  • Robert I. SuttonProfessor of management science at Stanford University
    This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page.
  • Mark ZuckerbergCofounder and CEO of Meta Platforms

About the authors

  • Ed CatmullCofounder of Pixar Animation Studios and Turing Award laureate
    • Born on March 31, 1945; an American computer scientist and animator who cofounded Pixar and was president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
    • Early in his life he found inspiration in Disney films and wanted to be an animator, but with no animation schools at the time he turned to a scientific career.
    • Graduated from the University of Utah in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in physics and computer science.
    • Earned his doctorate in computer science in 1974.
    • At the University of Utah he made two fundamental computer graphics discoveries, texture mapping and bicubic patches.
    • In 1979 George Lucas asked him to lead a group bringing computer graphics, video editing and digital sound into the entertainment field.
    • In 1986 Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar.
    • Received the 2019 ACM Turing Award, shared with Pat Hanrahan, for pioneering work on computer generated imagery.
  • Amy WallaceJournalist and collaborative author of books
    • A California based journalist and author who splits her time between magazines and books.
    • Began her career as an assistant to New York Times columnist James Reston, then spent two years at the Atlanta Journal Constitution covering prisons and death row.
    • Spent 11 years at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter covering state politics, higher education and the entertainment industry.
    • Shared in two staff Pulitzer Prizes at the Los Angeles Times, in 1992 for coverage of the Los Angeles riots and in 1994 for coverage of the Northridge earthquake.
    • Later a correspondent at GQ, an editor at large at Los Angeles magazine, and a monthly New York Times columnist on creativity and innovation.
    • Two of her magazine profiles, one in Los Angeles in 2001 and one in New York in 2019, were nominated for a National Magazine Award.
    • In 2014 she collaborated with Ed Catmull, then president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, on his New York Times bestseller Creativity, Inc.
    • Best known for collaborating with Virginia Roberts Giuffre on her bestselling memoir Nobody's Girl (Knopf, 2025).

More books like this