Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and led the studio through the creation of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and Wall-E. Creativity, Inc. is his account of how Pixar was built and the management philosophy behind it. The central problem Catmull was trying to solve is one that applies to every organisation that depends on talented people: how do you build a culture where honesty, creative risk, and excellence are the norm rather than the exception? His answer is built around removing the barriers that prevent people from doing their best work, including fear, hierarchy, and the pressure to appear confident when you are not.

For founders, operators, and anyone building a team, the chapters on feedback culture and what Pixar calls the Braintrust are directly applicable. The Braintrust is a group of trusted peers who review work in progress and give candid, unfiltered notes with no authority to mandate changes. The creator retains final say. This separation of feedback from authority is what makes the process work. It is a model for how investment committees, board reviews, and management teams could function if ego and hierarchy were removed from the room.

Catmull is unusually honest about failure. Several Pixar films were close to disasters before they became classics. The book is as much about how the studio recovered from problems as how it created hits. For anyone running a business where the quality of the output depends on the quality of the thinking, this is essential reading.