Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That
Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
By Ed Catmull
Random House, 340 pages
I hate business books
because they are usually very long memos that could have been written in 14
pages. You suspect they started as memos or even power point
slides.
I love books that tell
good stories. Creativity, Inc., by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, tells a good
story and in the process teaches us a lot about how to tell a good story.
Not Just a Story about Toys
Ed Catmull was a kid with
a dream, to produce animated movies
using computer technology. He wanted
to work at Walt Disney. They turned him down
at first, but he kept on following his passions.
Catmull’s path led through
some interesting places and people. He
studied computer technology at University of Utah, one of the four original
institutions on ARPANET, the precursor to what we now know as the Internet. His early, groundbreaking computer
animation work led to a job offer from George Lucas. While at Lucasfilm, Catmull hired Pixar’s
other co-founder, the animator John Lasseter, and what they built was spun off
to Steve Jobs in 1985. The new company’s
main business was selling the Pixar Image Computer. They were in the hardware business.
As we all know, they
eventually joined forces with Disney and became the animation studio that
produced Toy Story and many hit films
since. Like those films, the book tells
compelling stories. Inner-circle,
name-dropping – jaw dropping – stories of how these hit films made it through
the creative process and the business process.
And as this story unfolds,
you see Catmull evolve from a technologist to the head of one of the most
creative organizations ever built. Every
chapter illustrates a Pixar mantra, “Story Is King.”
Trust the Process.
Not!
Pixar had another mantra, “Trust
the Process”, which meant Pixar’s
process, very different from the corporate one at most Hollywood studios: “Pixar was a place that gave artists running
room, that gave directors control, that trusted its people to solve problems.” To me, this sounded more like “Trust the
Culture”, not “Trust the Process”, but it seemed to work for Pixar.
Indeed, it served them
well making Toy Story, but not so
well when simultaneously working on A
Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. They had grown. Suddenly more people were involved and
Catmull and Lasseter were pulled in different directions. The mantra lost meaning; it “morphed into ‘Assume
that the Process Will Fix Things for Us’.”
Unfortunately, Toy Story 2
lost meaning, too, and they realized they had to rewrite it just nine months
before theatrical release.
What did they learn from
that experience? The process only works
if the people are working well together, and while that was Pixar’s biggest
superpower, they weren’t using it at this critical, early stage of their
maturation as a company. They got back
on track by establishing a “Braintrust” that regularly reviewed how a story – a
film – was coming together. They didn’t
go back to Process so much as they went back to Culture.
They also learned that words
can be empty. “People glom onto words
and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning,” he
writes. Tellingly, he uses this occasion
to criticize our industry: “Advertisers look
for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value
itself.” Ouch.
So is process good or
bad? When we think of “process” in Ad
Land, it’s often a linear, stage-driven timeline, which isn’t how creativity
really works. You need a process, of
course, because the alternative is chaos, but how to let it roll? The Toy
Story 2 experience taught them how to strike a balance by returning to
their natural strength in collaboration.
It makes sense to “trust people to solve problems” when they’re doing it
in a group, not in separate silos.
Three Lessons Advertising, Inc. Can Learn from
Creativity, Inc.
Although this book can
teach a few things to any creative
enterprise, here are three lessons for Ad Land.
- Story trumps Technology. Catmull’s
childhood dream wasn’t to bring new technology to animation; it was to make
animated movies using
technology. Everything he invented was
in service of telling the story. His
biggest satisfaction in the success of Toy
Story was how audiences and critics loved the story so much they barely
mentioned the use of computers to tell it.
- Feedback diagnoses, not prescribes. You’ll
appreciate the many vignettes of Pixar’s “Braintrust” meetings to discuss films
in development. They built such a strong
culture of mutual respect and focus on the work that every session was about
what to address – not how to address it.
(In the last chapter, “Notes Day”, we see how this culture improved the
company as a whole.) In contrast, they
discovered that Disney’s Michael Eisner didn’t even discuss; he just issued
lists of “mandatory notes”.
- People create Ideas. This sounds
obvious but Catmull points out that many leaders confuse the need for Great
Ideas with the need for Great People. He
concludes: “Getting the team right is
the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.” (This reminded me of the only business book I
ever liked, Good to Great, which
made exactly the same point in its first chapter.)
Which brings us to Steve
Jobs, the deus ex machina in this
story. Jobs was smart enough not to push
his way into scripts, storyboards and edits, though he certainly had that
right. He invested heavily in Pixar –
and he believed in it and he stayed loyal to it. Catmull mentions Steve when he’s relevant to
the story, and that was often enough that I planned to mention it in this
review. Then I got to the end of the
book, and saw Afterword: The Steve We Knew.
It’s a beautiful tribute to Jobs and an appraisal of his impact on
Pixar.
Read this book,
people. At minimum it’s a good story you
won’t want to put down. But it also
teaches us a lot about how advertising people can work together and tell a good
story.
