How do you build a company that makes hit after hit — fourteen in a row — in a business where almost everyone fails? Creativity, Inc. is Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull’s answer: a management book disguised as a memoir, arguing that sustained creative success is not about hiring geniuses but about building a culture where candor is safe, failure is data, and new ideas are protected from the organization’s immune system.
Book Summary
Published in 2014 and co-written with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc. follows Catmull from his childhood dream of becoming a Disney animator, through his pioneering work in computer graphics, to co-founding Pixar in 1986 and leading it through Toy Story (1995) and an unprecedented run of critical and commercial successes. The book’s second act covers Disney’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Pixar in 2006, when Catmull and John Lasseter were put in charge of the moribund Disney Animation — and revived it with Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen.
The heart of the book is the operating system Catmull built: the Braintrust, a candid-feedback group with no authority to mandate changes; the daily review process; postmortems that hunt for systemic causes rather than blame; and “Notes Day,” when Pixar shut down production for a full day so every employee could help fix the company’s problems. His core claim is contrarian and worth underlining: failure is not a necessary evil but the unavoidable cost of doing anything original — so the job of management is to make failing safe, fast, and cheap.
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Who is Ed Catmull?
Ed Catmull is a computer scientist who helped invent the technology behind modern computer animation — texture mapping, z-buffering, and other foundations of the field. He co-founded Pixar in 1986 alongside Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, served as its president, and after Disney acquired Pixar became president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is that rare figure: a technologist who became one of the great managers of creative people, and Creativity, Inc. is his account of what thirty years of that work taught him.
Lessons From Creativity, Inc.
Candor is the scarcest resource in any organization. The Braintrust works because it separates feedback from authority: smart people give brutally honest notes on a film in progress, but the director is never obligated to follow them. Catmull’s insight is that hierarchy corrupts feedback — people tell the boss what the boss wants to hear — so candor has to be engineered into the process deliberately. Investors take note: when evaluating management teams, ask whether bad news can travel upward.
Protect new ideas — they arrive as “ugly babies.” Every Pixar film starts out terrible; Toy Story 2 was nearly scrapped, and WALL-E‘s story was rebuilt from scratch. The managerial instinct to judge early work by finished standards kills originality. The parallel for investors is patience with new initiatives inside companies you own: the ugly-baby phase is normal, and killing projects too early is as costly as funding them too long.
Fail early and fail fast. Pixar’s process is designed to surface problems when they are cheap to fix — story reels, daily reviews, constant iteration — rather than discovering them after hundreds of millions are spent. “Fail early” is not a slogan but an economic argument: the cost of failure rises exponentially with time, so speed of feedback is a competitive advantage.
Quality is the business plan. Catmull’s most quotable line — give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up; give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will fix it or throw it away — reframes the entire strategy conversation. Pixar never chased trends, release windows, or merchandising; it chased quality and let the business results follow. Fourteen consecutive hits suggest the causation runs that way.
Hire people smarter than you, then get out of their way. Catmull is explicit that his job was not to be the most creative person at Pixar but to build the environment where creative people could do their best work — and to resist the urge to prevent the mistakes that turn out to be load-bearing. For anyone running a team, this is the book’s most actionable and most ignored lesson.
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Criticisms of the Book
Catmull is a better manager than memoirist, and it shows: the prose is workmanlike, and co-writer Amy Wallace’s hand is sometimes visible in the seams. The book is light on Pixar’s actual failures — Cars 2 gets a passing nod, and the difficult years after the Disney acquisition are smoothed over. The Braintrust, for all its fame, is hard to transplant: it worked at Pixar because of decades of trust, and Catmull is honest enough to admit the mechanism matters less than the culture, but readers hunting for a plug-and-play system will be disappointed. Still, these are criticisms of what the book isn’t, not of what it is.
Who is This Book For?
Essential for founders, managers, and anyone who leads creative or technical teams — the Braintrust and postmortem chapters alone justify the price. Investors should read it as a field guide to evaluating creative businesses: the questions Catmull asks about culture are the questions you should ask about any company whose value lives in its people’s heads. And anyone who loves Pixar’s films will enjoy the behind-the-scenes stories of how they almost didn’t happen.
Final Thoughts
Creativity, Inc. belongs on the short shelf of management books that actually changed how companies are run. Its central argument — that the job of leadership is to build a culture where the truth gets spoken and new ideas survive their ugly infancy — applies far beyond animation. The Steve Jobs thread running through the Pixar founding story also makes it a natural companion to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs: same events, seen through the eyes of the technologist who had to make the impossible practical.
