Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull — book cover

Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull · 2014

Creativity, Inc. (2014) is a book by Ed Catmull on business & strategy. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull distills decades of running a creative studio into a candid manual on building a company where original ideas survive, through honest feedback, embraced failure, and vigilance against the unseen forces that stifle creativity.

12 min read · 8 chapters · Leadership

Why it’s on the shelf

Pixar's co-founder reveals that protecting creativity isn't about hiring geniuses, it's about relentlessly hunting the hidden forces that quietly kill original work.

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Creativity, Inc. pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

  1. Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they'll ruin it; give a mediocre idea to a great team and they'll fix it or throw it away. Catmull's core lesson from Pixar is that people and how they work together matter far more than ideas, so invest in the team, not the pitch.
  2. Every Pixar film 'sucks' at first. Movies start out as what Catmull calls ugly babies, awkward, unformed, and easily killed by premature judgment; the job of leadership is to protect the new and fragile long enough for it to grow up.

The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 8 chapters

The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.

  1. The Missing Piece: From Toy Story to a Sinking Feeling
  2. Ideas Are Cheap, Teams Are Everything
  3. The Braintrust: Candor Without Authority
  4. Fear, Failure, and the Ugly Baby
  5. The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby
  6. The Hidden and the Unmade Future
  7. Broadening Vision: Notes Day and Removing Barriers
  8. The Steve Jobs I Knew

Finish Creativity, Inc. tonight.

Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.

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