Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming Unseen Forces for True Inspiration

Pixar's co-founder and longtime president, Ed Catmull, has updated and expanded his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership. He reflects on the management principles that have built Pixar’s highly successful culture and shares all he has learned during the past nine years, allowing Pixar to maintain its creative culture while evolving.

For almost thirty years, Pixar has been a dominant force in the world of animation, producing beloved films such as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E. These movies have broken box-office records and received eighteen Academy Awards. The storytelling, plots, and emotional authenticity in Pixar movies serve as a lesson in creativity. In this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar widely admired and profitable.

Ed Catmull had a dream as a young man: to create the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured this dream as a Ph.D. student and later partnered with George Lucas, which indirectly led to the founding of Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in the success of that movie, and the twenty-five films that followed, was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar.

Based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as giving a mediocre idea to a great team and allowing them to fix it or come up with something better, the management principles at Pixar have been key to their success.

Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to shed light on the ongoing development of Pixar’s unique culture. The book features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Catmull emphasizes that pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job, and Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

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