Creativity, Inc. | Ed Catmull

Great Management Tips from The Book Creativity, Inc.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay

Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

The closing took place on a Monday morning in February 1986, and the mood in the room was decidedly muted because everyone was so worn out by the negotiations. After we signed our names, Steve pulled Alvy and me aside, put his arms around us and said, “Whatever happens, we have to be loyal to each other.” 

Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation—you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

Creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.

Nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.

As Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process either makes you or unmakes you.” I like Brad’s way of looking at it because while it gives the process power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well.

To ensure that it succeeded, I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.

We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).

But it wasn’t just the numbers that made us proud; money, after all, is just one measure of a thriving company and usually not the most meaningful one. No, what I found gratifying was what we’d created.

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

A good team is made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.

In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s a corollary to this, as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it.

You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal.

Communication was key, no matter what your position was.

The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.

At Apple, Steve Jobs had the reputation for being deeply involved in the most minute detail of every product, but at Pixar, he didn’t believe that his instincts were better than the people here, so he stayed out. That’s how much candor matters at Pixar: It overrides hierarchy.

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do.

I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. The obvious payoffs of exceptional people are that they innovate, excel, and generally make your company—and, by extension, you—look good.

It’s folly to think you can avoid change, no matter how much you might want to. But also, to my mind, you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change.

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

Despite being novice filmmakers at a fledgling studio in dire financial straits, we had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes—without toppling over a few times. “Get a bike that’s as low to the ground as you can find, put on elbow and knee pads so you’re not afraid of falling, and go,” he says. If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes.

Successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

The first principle was “Story Is King,” by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story. We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen. We believed that this was the direct result of our always keeping story as our guiding light. The other principle we depended on was “Trust the Process.” We liked this one

“Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.”

With certain jobs, there isn’t any other way to learn than by doing—by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.

What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.

Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.

It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’ If that’s at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we’re getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I’ll attack the problem again.”

My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

Another trick is to encourage people to play. “Some of the best ideas come out of joking around”.

If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

Imagine a door that, when you swing it open, reveals the universe of all that you do not and cannot know. It’s vast, that universe—far larger than we are even conscious of. But ignorance is not necessarily bliss. This universe of unknown stuff will intrude in our lives and activities, so we have no choice but to deal with it. One of the ways to do that is to try to understand the many reasons why something may be difficult or impossible to see. To gain this understanding requires identifying multiple levels of the unknown, from the trivial to the fundamental.

The past should be our teacher, not our master.

We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses and save their lesser moments for their peers, spouses, or therapists. And yet, so many managers aren’t aware of it when it’s happening (perhaps because they enjoy being deferred to). It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged. But that is just one example of how hiddenness affects a manager’s ability to lead.