Creativity Inc

Introduction: Lost and Found

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The animators who work here are free to— no, encouraged to— decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and castles whose meticulously painted, fifteen- foot- high styrofoam turrets appear to be carved from stone. Annual company traditions include “Pixarpalooza,” where our in- house rock bands battle for dominance, shredding their hearts out on stages we erect on our front lawn. The point is, we value self- expression here. This tends to make a big impression on visitors, who often tell me that the experience of walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives— a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense, not to be corny, of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on— call it exuberance or irreverence, even whimsy— is integral to our success. But it’s not what makes Pixar special.

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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. This, more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning. It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.

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I’d spent two decades building a train and laying its track. Now, the thought of merely driving it struck me as a far less interesting task.

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We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

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I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative— whatever form that creativity takes— and that to encourage such development is a noble thing.

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The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process.

Part I: Getting Started

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When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe.

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He always went out of his way to give credit to his forebears, the men— and, at this point, they were all men— who’d done the pioneering work upon which he was building his empire.

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In this highlight he is talking about Walt Disney

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Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought things into being— both artistically and technologically— that did not exist before. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was. I read every Einstein biography I could get my hands on as well as a little book he wrote on his theory of relativity. I loved how the concepts he developed forced people to change their approach to physics and matter, to view the universe from a different perspective.

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The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being.

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Professor Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate students at Utah because we didn’t know what was impossible.

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And ever since, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am.

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He mentions how he was afraid that he would be hiring the guy who eventually replaced him. He needed to let that fear go in order to makr the right move

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The first thing he asked me was, “Who else should Lucasfilm be considering for this job?” Meaning, the job I was there to interview for. Without hesitation, I rattled off the names of several people who were doing impressive work in a variety of technical areas. My willingness to do this reflected my world- view, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it. Not to acknowledge that seemed silly. Only later would I learn that the guys at Lucasfilm had already interviewed all the people I listed and had asked them, in turn, to make similar recommendations— and not one of them had suggested any other names!

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Whether evoking wagons or ships, George thought in terms of a long view; he believed in the future and his ability to shape it.

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For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

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There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

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The first question was pretty basic: How do we figure out how much to charge for our machine? I was told by the presidents of Sun and Silicon Graphics to start with a high number. If you start high, they said, you can always reduce the price; if you lowball it and then need to raise the price later, you will only upset your customers. So based on the profit margins we wanted, we decided on a price of $ 122,000 per unit. Big mistake. The Pixar Image Computer quickly gained a reputation for being powerful but too expensive. When we lowered the price later, we discovered that our reputation for being overpriced was all anyone remembered. Regardless of our attempts to correct it, the first impression stuck. The pricing advice I was given— by people who were smart and experienced and well- meaning— was not merely wrong, it kept us from asking the right questions. Instead of talking about whether it’s easier to lower a price than raise it, we should have been addressing more substantive issues such as how to meet the expectations of customers and how to keep investing in software development so that the customers who did buy our product could put it to better use. In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions— do this, not that— because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice— so seductive in its rationality— had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

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This is interesting because the advice he views as bad is similar to the advice that I have seen as sound coming from Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi, namely pricing high to establish yourself as top quality. Maybe this advice works better for goods where people aren’t sure how much to value it at, such as art or online courses. Maybe there are marketing factors that help determine if it will work.

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Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches— phrases like “just- in- time manufacturing” or “total quality control”— but the essence was this: The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard- of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

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This is in contrast to Henry Ford’s approach to never stopping the line to keep efficiency up and costs down

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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.

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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.

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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. 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.

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Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

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Mistakes are part of creativity.

Part II: Protecting the New

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The film itself— not the filmmaker— is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

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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.

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For most of us, failure comes with baggage— a lot of baggage— that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or— worse!— aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft- repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of shame is too deep- seated to erase.

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All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.

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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). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.

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The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.

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While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

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It isn’t enough to pick a path— you must go down it.

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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. The 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.

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But just because “failure free” is crucial in some industries does not mean that it should be a goal in all of them. When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.

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While experimentation is scary to many, I would argue that we should be far more terrified of the opposite approach. Being too risk- averse causes many companies to stop innovating and to reject new ideas, which is the first step on the path to irrelevance.

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

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One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.

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Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

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Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on— but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

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The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive.

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I often say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. What does that mean? It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions— our values— remain constant, our goals can shift as needed. At Pixar, we try never to waver in our ethics, our values, and our intention to create original, quality products. We are willing to adjust our goals as we learn, striving to get it right— not necessarily to get it right the first time. Because that, to my mind, is the only way to establish something else that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new.

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Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

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Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.

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I’ve heard some people describe creativity as ‘unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.’

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There is a crucial yet hard- to- understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed.

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The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20- 20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future.

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However, the magician doesn’t create the illusion— we do.

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I’ll say it again: Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.

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When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it. In a fundamental way, the movie is hidden from us. (I refer to this concept as the “Unmade Future,” and I will devote a subsequent chapter to the central role it plays in creativity.)

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While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.

Part III: Building and Sustaining

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Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.

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You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.

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The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

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Some might have lost sleep over the two million dollars we expended on this experiment. But we consider it money well spent. As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”

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He tells the story of a chidren’s author who wanted to direct a feature. They had him direct a short instead and it came in at a whopping 12 minutes. Moreover, the story meandered and packed no emotional punch.

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I hired Elyse Klaidman, who had taught drawing workshops inspired by the 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, to come in and teach us how to heighten our powers of observation. In those days, you’d often hear about the concepts of left- and right- brained thinking, later called L- mode and R- mode. The L- mode was verbal/ analytic, R- mode was visual/ perceptual. Elyse taught us that while many activities used both L- mode and R- mode, drawing required shutting the L- mode off. This amounted to learning to suppress that part of your brain that jumps to conclusions, seeing an image as only an image and not as an object.

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Think about what happens when we try to draw a face. Most of us sketch out the nose, eyes, forehead, ears, and mouth but— unless we’ve learned to draw formally— they’re terribly out of proportion. They don’t resemble anybody in particular. That’s because, to the brain, all parts of the face are not created equal. For example, since the eyes and mouth— the loci of communication— are more important to us than foreheads, more emphasis is put on recognizing them, and when we draw them, we tend to draw them too large, while the forehead is drawn too small. We don’t draw a face as it is; rather, we draw it as our models say it is.

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Art teachers use a few different tricks to train new artists. They place an object upside down, for example, so that each student can look at it as a pure shape and not as a familiar, recognizable thing (a shoe, say). The brain does not distort this upside- down object because it doesn’t automatically impose its model of a shoe upon it.

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Another trick is to ask students to focus on negative spaces— the areas of space around an object that are not the object itself. For instance, in drawing a chair, the new artist might draw it poorly, because she knows what a chair is supposed to look like (and that chair in her head— her mental model— keeps her from reproducing precisely what she sees in front of her). However, if she is asked to draw what is not the chair— the spaces between the chair legs, for example— then the proportions are easier to get right, and the chair itself will look more realistic. The reason is that while the brain recognizes a chair as a chair, it assigns no meaning to the shape of the spaces between the chair’s legs (and, thus, doesn’t try to “correct” it to make it match the artist’s mental model).

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It is a fact of life, though a confounding one, that focusing on something can make it more difficult to see.

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Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.

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I like data because it is neutral— there are no value judgments, only facts.

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There are limits to data, however, and some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means. It is very easy to find false patterns in data. Instead, I prefer to think of data as one way of seeing, one of many tools we can use to look for what’s hidden. If we think data alone provides answers, then we have misapplied the tool. It is important to get this right. Some people swing to the extremes of either having no interest in the data or believing that the facts of measurement alone should drive our management. Either extreme can lead to false conclusions.

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Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.

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It puts me in mind of a night, many years ago, when I found myself at an art exhibit at my daughter’s elementary school in Marin. As I walked up and down the hallways, looking at the paintings and sketches made by kids in grades K through 5, I noticed that the first- and second- graders’ drawings looked better and fresher than those of the fifth- graders. Somewhere along the line, the fifth- graders had realized that their drawings did not look realistic, and they had become self- conscious and tentative. The result? Their drawings became more stilted and staid, less inventive, because they probably thought that others would recognize this “fault.” The fear of judgment was hindering creativity.

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If fear hinders us even in grade school, no wonder it takes such discipline— some people even call it a practice— to turn off that inner critic in adulthood and return to a place of openness. In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it.

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By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new.

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The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

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In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself.

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My old friend from the University of Utah, Alan Kay— Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs— expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

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Pete Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. “There’s a really scary point in the middle where it’s just dark,” he says. “There’s no light from where you came in and there’s no light at the other end; all you can do is keep going. And then you start to see a little light and then a little more light and then, suddenly, you’re out in the bright sun.” For Pete, this metaphor is a way of making that moment— the one in which you can’t see your own hand in front of your face and you aren’t sure you’ll ever find your way out— a bit less frightening. Because your rational mind knows that tunnels have two ends, your emotional mind can be kept in check when pitch blackness descends in the confusing middle. Instead of collapsing into a nervous mess, the director who has a clear internal model of what creativity is— and the discomfort it requires— finds it easier to trust that light will shine again. The key is to never stop moving forward.

Part IV: Testing What We Know

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But like I always say when talking about making a movie, easy isn’t the goal. Quality is the goal.

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Partly, too, clarity was elusive because I don’t believe in simple, prescriptive formulas for success.

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Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion.

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“Sometimes I think people have gotten too comfortable,” John said when we gathered in a renovated chapel on the resort grounds. “They need to feel excited— to feel like we once did: on fire and buzzing with possibility!”

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When Guido had the floor, he told a story about something he’d instituted in his department called “personal project days.” Two days a month, he allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted, using Pixar’s resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting. It didn’t have to be directly applicable to any particular film or address any of production’s needs. If an engineer wanted to see what it was like to light a shot in Brave, for example, he or she could. If a group of engineers wanted to build a prototype using Kinect, Microsoft’s motion- sensing input device, to help animators capture characters’ movements, they could do that, too. Any idea that sparked their curiosity, they were free to pursue. “You just give people the time, and they come up with the ideas,” Guido told us. “That’s the beauty of it: It comes from them.”

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Some people might measure the day’s success by charting the concrete results that resulted from it, and in fact, we have paid attention to that too. But real improvement comes from consistent rigor and participation.

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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Things change, constantly, as they should. And with change comes the need for adaptation, for fresh thinking, and, sometimes, for even a total reboot— of your project, your department, your division, or your company as a whole. In times of change, we need support— from our families and from our colleagues.

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I’m reminded here of a letter written by one of our animators, Austin Madison, which I found particularly uplifting. “To Whom it May Inspire,” Austin wrote. “I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white- hot, ‘in the zone’ seat- of- the- pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office- corner- full- of- crumpled- up- paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.… ”

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Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

Afterword: The Steve We Knew

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Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn’t work. If you were in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would instantly change his mind. He didn’t hold on to an idea because he had once believed it to be brilliant. His ego didn’t attach to the suggestions he made, even as he threw his full weight behind them.

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He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live forever. He believed, as I do, that because they dig for deeper truths, our movies will endure, and he found beauty in that idea.

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This quote was talking about Steve Jobs

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Yes, he tested boundaries and crossed the line at times. As a behavioral trait, that can be seen as antisocial— or if it happens to change the world, it can earn you the label “visionary.” We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice.

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A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining— dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true— is the way we discover what is new or important.

Starting Points: Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture

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I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T- shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding— and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior.

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When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.

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Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.

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Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

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Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

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Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up— it means you trust them even when they do screw up.

Highlight (yellow) – Chapter 13: Notes Day > Page 319

Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not- so- greatness. Protect the future, not the past.