Book of the Week: Creativity, Inc.

02 Jul 2014

I couldn’t have picked a better book to follow Good to Great. Since I know what it takes to make a good company great, I can see those same things described in this book. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull, cofounder and the CTO of Pixar, talks about the business side of creating a creative culture and protecting that culture. Ed Catmull is not only a legend in the area of computer graphics, but he also went to school with other people who founded Adobe, Silicon Graphics, and Netscape. When I think of great companies, Pixar is on that list. They made hit movie after hit movie. The worst thing about the company is that nobody quits, so there is no upward mobility. If the worst thing about your company is that nobody quits, things have to be pretty good there. The book is divided into four parts: Getting Started, Protecting the New, Building and Sustaining, and Testing What We Know. Team > Ideas

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. The takeaway here is worth repeating: 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. A good team is made up of people who complement each other.

For a startup, having a cohesive team is paramount to it’s success. People are important. A company’s culture is created by how the leaders act and behave. JapaneseManufacturing Ed is another person fascinated by how Japanese manufacturing increased their quality. Maybe it has to do with the age of all the authors of the books I’ve been reading lately. What I didn’t know before is that W. Edwards Deming was the person responsible for the rise in Japanese manufacturing prowess since he was involved with the post-war rebuilding efforts. It is the principle of continuous improvement in that each person is held accountable for that leads to ownership and increased quality. Braintrust Pixar implement a braintrust that made all their movies better. It was a forum where the movie could get constructive feedback. Where people could feel free to express how they really feel. Ed talks about candor, because if you talk about being honesty, there is an implication that there is dishonesty. Unless someone is willing to give honest feedback on the movie, the movie’s problems will not get fixed and the movie will fail to be quality Movies are like startups and writing. They start out bad, but you revise and pivot until you get to something good. Part of the process is exploring is discovering the truly good stuff and being willing to realize what is the bad stuff and what you want to keep for now and what you want to keep for another time. Failure is part of the process. The movie Up started out as a king and his two sons in a castle in the sky. The Up I saw in theaters was totally different. The only things that remained the same was the title of the movie and a tall bird as a character. Iterating with candid feedback leads to better products. The Braintrust can identify problems, but it is up to the director to solve it. Failure School teaches us that failures is bad. fear of failure is what keeps you from being creative. kids are creative, school beats the creativity out of them. David Kelley of IDEO and Ken Robinson have a lot of say about the subject. People repeat the safe stuff instead of exploring a new space. Fear of judgment hinders creativity. Randomness and Luck

When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success.

Someone accidentally deleted all the data on Toy Story 2 and the backups weren’t working. Luckily, the movie was saved, because the pregnant technical director made weekly backups, so she could work from home. She didn’t ask permission to do that. If Pixar had something against hiring pregnant women (illegal), they would have been screwed. You never know how things will go. Bonus: Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffixfwt654I It took Ed 20 years to realized his dream of making an animated film. Pixar pivoted from selling computers to making animated films. I like books about business from a person with a technical perspective. This book is no exception. It is hard the summarize this book. You need to pick it up and read it yourself.