Creativity, Inc.
Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace · first published 2001
64% recommend33% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Pixar story that shows how to run and nurture creative teams: candid feedback, iterating on films, and leadership lessons, with some Steve Jobs history. Suits managers, engineers, and anyone leading creative work.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
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There is a great story in Ed catmull's new book creativity inc that tells how the handled the time when rm -rf ~/* was run on the Toy Story II servers, deleting 90% of the finished film weeks before the release. Not a problem till they realized the backup system…
on “Unix Recovery Legend (1986)” ↗Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-c... Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way. Secondly, failure…
on “ClusterHQ is shutting down” ↗I really recommend reading Creativity Inc. By Ed Catmull, one of the cofounders of Pixar. It's an incredible book full of insight on how Pixar fosters creativity to create hit after hit movie. It really helped me shift my mind during some difficult…
on “Pixar in a Box” ↗there is a book called "creativity inc." by ed-catmull which also is pretty good. it is more of an exposition of management style at pixar than anything else though. might not suit everyone's fancy :) edit: but if you like that kind of thing,…
on “How Steve Jobs Became a Billionaire” ↗…book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story. The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach) Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar) To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull) Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace…
on “The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read” ↗…conversations, performance reviews etc. Also, look for general management books. Leadership is something all humans do – software management is about managing creative people. Some other books I recommend are: • Creativity, Inc by Ed Matmull • Crucial Conversation • Team of Teams For email newsletters, I recommend Software Lead Weekly (https://softwareleadweekly.com/) and Better Allies (https://betterallies.com/more-content/).…
on “Ask HN: Books to read when you transform from SWE into SWE Management?” ↗I recommend Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc about the founding of Pixar.
on “Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award” ↗I'm loving Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc at the moment, but I do tend to forget he is PhD in Computer Science who invented texture mapping. The articles are really over my head too. It is worth noting that Catmull attributes their original…
on “Pixar Online Library” ↗…or "self-help" books, though I read those too and have received value from them as well. Here are some books I'd recommend in the former vein: 1. Elon Musk - as mentioned, awesome, inspiring read 2. Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull's story of Pixar 3. Masters of Doom - Carmack is a boss 4. The Innovators - The people who created the computing world 5. Hackers - The people who created the computing world 6. Steve…
on “Ask HN: Non-tech books that have helped you grow professionally?” ↗"While Jobs was explaining why he thought old tech giants had fallen from grace, he probably wasn’t thinking about Apple at that time. " I doubt that. Just read Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." (highly recommended) and all his thoughts that went into making Pixar (Steve's other company) sustainable and returning a fallen Disney animation around. The question what went wrong elsewhere is central…
on “Steve Jobs would probably very upset with what Apple has become” ↗Creativity Inc., by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. A funny and insightful book that should be required reading for any technical leader who works with artists/designers. http://www.creativityincbook.com
on “Ask HN: As a technical founder what is the best business book you've read?” ↗…World’s #1 Company [3]Guerilla Marketing [4]The Lords of Strategy [5]Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion [6] The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive [7]The Deming Management Method [8]Creativity Inc. [9]The Wisdom of Teams [10]On Communication [11]On Managing Yourself [12]The Art of Facilitation [13]Death by Meeting [14]Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning [15]Makers…
on “Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?” ↗For anyone looking for a deeper dive into how Pixar iterates on their movies and how highly-functioning creative teams can work in general, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull is a really interesting book. It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from…
on “Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling” ↗Highly recommend the book by Ed Catmull (Creativity Inc). He is regarded as being one of the great people managers.
on “Photos Apple's first employees showed us from the company's earliest days” ↗I am reading / listening to Pixar Founder Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc" which is utterly brilliant and based around this topic too - and his take is that so much of these rules are platitudes. The four mentioned in this article are close but still feel like platitudes.…
on “Common foundation of great engineering cultures” ↗