Copyright © 2014 by Edwin Catmull
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Catmull, Edwin E. Creativity, Inc. : overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration / Ed Catmull with
Amy Wallace. pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9301-1 eBook ISBN 978-0-67964450-7
1. Creative ability in business. 2. Corporate culture. 3. Organizational effectiveness. 4. Pixar (Firm) I. Wallace, Amy. II. Title.
HD53.C394 2014 658.4′0714—dc23 2013036026
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Andy Dreyfus Jacket illustration: © Disney • Pixar
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover Title Page Copyright
Introduction: Lost and Found
PART I: GETTING STARTED Chapter 1: Animated Chapter 2: Pixar Is Born Chapter 3: A Defining Goal Chapter 4: Establishing Pixar’s Identity
PART II: PROTECTING THE NEW Chapter 5: Honesty and Candor Chapter 6: Fear and Failure Chapter 7: The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby Chapter 8: Change and Randomness Chapter 9: The Hidden
PART III: BUILDING AND SUSTAINING Chapter 10: Broadening Our View Chapter 11: The Unmade Future
PART IV: TESTING WHAT WE KNOW Chapter 12: A New Challenge Chapter 13: Notes Day
Afterword: The Steve We Knew Starting Points: Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture
Photo Insert Dedication
Acknowledgments About the Authors
INTRODUCTION: LOST AND FOUND
Every morning, as I walk into Pixar Animation Studios—past the twenty-foot- high sculpture of Luxo Jr., our friendly desk lamp mascot, through the double doors and into a spectacular glass-ceilinged atrium where a man-sized Buzz Lightyear and Woody, made entirely of Lego bricks, stand at attention, up the stairs past sketches and paintings of the characters that have populated our fourteen films—I am struck by the unique culture that defines this place. Although I’ve made this walk thousands of times, it never gets old. Built on the site of a former cannery, Pixar’s fifteen-acre campus, just over the
Bay Bridge from San Francisco, was designed, inside and out, by Steve Jobs. (Its name, in fact, is The Steve Jobs Building.) It has well-thought-out patterns of entry and egress that encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate. Outside, there is a soccer field, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, and a six- hundred-seat amphitheater. Sometimes visitors misunderstand the place, thinking it’s fancy for fancy’s sake. What they miss is that the unifying idea for this building isn’t luxury but community. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate. 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. 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. There was a time, however, when my purpose here felt a lot less clear to me.
And it might surprise you when I tell you when.
On November 22, 1995, Toy Story debuted in America’s theaters and became the largest Thanksgiving opening in history. Critics heralded it as “inventive” (Time), “brilliant” and “exultantly witty” (The New York Times), and “visionary” (Chicago Sun-Times). To find a movie worthy of comparison, wrote The Washington Post, one had to go back to 1939, to The Wizard of Oz. The making of Toy Story—the first feature film to be animated entirely on a
computer—had required every ounce of our tenacity, artistry, technical wizardry, and endurance. The hundred or so men and women who produced it had weathered countless ups and downs as well as the ever-present, hair-raising knowledge that our survival depended on this 80-minute experiment. For five straight years, we’d fought to do Toy Story our way. We’d resisted the advice of Disney executives who believed that since they’d had such success with musicals, we too should fill our movie with songs. We’d rebooted the story completely, more than once, to make sure it rang true. We’d worked nights, weekends, and holidays—mostly without complaint. Despite being novice filmmakers at a fledgling studio in dire financial straits, we had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too. For so long, it felt like we had been pushing that rock up the hill, trying to do the impossible. There were plenty of moments when the future of Pixar was in doubt. Now, we were suddenly being held up as an example of what could happen when artists trusted their guts. Toy Story went on to become the top-grossing film of the year and would earn
$358 million worldwide. But it wasn’t just the numbers that made us proud; money, after all, is just one measure of a thriving company and usually not the most meaningful one. No, what I found gratifying was what we’d created. Review after review focused on the film’s moving plotline and its rich, three-
dimensional characters—only briefly mentioning, almost as an aside, that it had been made on a computer. While there was much innovation that enabled our work, we had not let the technology overwhelm our real purpose: making a great film. On a personal level, Toy Story represented the fulfillment of a goal I had
pursued for more than two decades and had dreamed about since I was a boy. Growing up in the 1950s, I had yearned to be a Disney animator but had no idea how to go about it. Instinctively, I realize now, I embraced computer graphics— then a new field—as a means of pursuing that dream. If I couldn’t animate by hand, there had to be another way. In graduate school, I’d quietly set a goal of making the first computer-animated feature film, and I’d worked tirelessly for twenty years to accomplish it. Now, the goal that had been a driving force in my life had been reached, and
there was an enormous sense of relief and exhilaration—at least at first. In the wake of Toy Story’s release, we took the company public, raising the kind of money that would ensure our future as an independent production house, and began work on two new feature-length projects, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. Everything was going our way, and yet I felt adrift. In fulfilling a goal, I had lost some essential framework. Is this really what I want to do? I began asking myself. The doubts surprised and confused me, and I kept them to myself. I had served as Pixar’s president for most of the company’s existence. I loved the place and everything that it stood for. Still, I couldn’t deny that achieving the goal that had defined my professional life had left me without one. Is this all there is? I wondered. Is it time for a new challenge? It wasn’t that I thought Pixar had “arrived” or that my work was done. I knew
there were major obstacles in front of us. The company was growing quickly, with lots of shareholders to please, and we were racing to put two new films into production. There was, in short, plenty to occupy my working hours. But my internal sense of purpose—the thing that had led me to sleep on the floor of the computer lab in graduate school just to get more hours on the mainframe, that kept me awake at night, as a kid, solving puzzles in my head, that fueled my every workday—had gone missing. 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. Was making one film after another enough to engage me? I wondered. What would be my organizing principle now? It would take a full year for the answer to emerge.
From the start, my professional life seemed destined to have one foot in Silicon
Valley and the other in Hollywood. I first got into the film business in 1979 when, flush from the success of Star Wars, George Lucas hired me to help him bring high technology into the film industry. But he wasn’t based in Los Angeles. Instead, he’d founded his company, Lucasfilm, at the north end of the San Francisco Bay. Our offices were located in San Rafael, about an hour’s drive from Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley—a moniker that was just gaining traction then, as the semiconductor and computer industries took off. That proximity gave me a front-row seat from which to observe the many emerging hardware and software companies—not to mention the growing venture capital industry—that, in the course of a few years, would come to dominate Silicon Valley from its perch on Sand Hill Road. I couldn’t have arrived at a more dynamic and volatile time. I watched as
many startups burned bright with success—and then flamed out. My mandate at Lucasfilm—to merge moviemaking with technology—meant that I rubbed shoulders with the leaders of places like Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics and Cray Computer, several of whom I came to know well. I was first and foremost a scientist then, not a manager, so I watched these guys closely, hoping to learn from the trajectories their companies followed. Gradually, a pattern began to emerge: Someone had a creative idea, obtained funding, brought on a lot of smart people, and developed and sold a product that got a boatload of attention. That initial success begat more success, luring the best engineers and attracting customers who had interesting and high-profile problems to solve. As these companies grew, much was written about their paradigm-shifting approaches, and when their CEOs inevitably landed on the cover of Fortune magazine, they were heralded as “Titans of the New.” I especially remember the confidence. The leaders of these companies radiated supreme confidence. Surely, they could only have reached this apex by being very, very good. But then those companies did something stupid—not just stupid-in-retrospect,
but obvious-at-the-time stupid. I wanted to understand why. What was causing smart people to make decisions that sent their companies off the rails? I didn’t doubt that they believed they were doing the right thing, but something was blinding them—and keeping them from seeing the problems that threatened to upend them. As a result, their companies expanded like bubbles, then burst. What interested me was not that companies rose and fell or that the landscape continually shifted as technology changed but that the leaders of these companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work. Over the years, as Pixar struggled to find its way—first selling hardware, then
software, then making animated short films and advertisements—I asked myself:
If Pixar is ever successful, will we do something stupid, too? Can paying careful attention to the missteps of others help us be more alert to our own? Or is there something about becoming a leader that makes you blind to the things that threaten the well-being of your enterprise? Clearly, something was causing a dangerous disconnect at many smart, creative companies. What, exactly, was a mystery—and one I was determined to figure out. In the difficult year after Toy Story’s debut, I came to realize that trying to
solve this mystery would be my next challenge. My desire to protect Pixar from the forces that ruin so many businesses gave me renewed focus. I began to see my role as a leader more clearly. I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company but a sustainable creative culture. As I turned my attention from solving technical problems to engaging with the philosophy of sound management, I was excited once again—and sure that our second act could be as exhilarating as our first.
It has always been my goal to create a culture at Pixar that will outlast its founding leaders—Steve, John Lasseter, and me. But it is also my goal to share our underlying philosophies with other leaders and, frankly, with anyone who wrestles with the competing—but necessarily complementary—forces of art and commerce. What you’re holding in your hands, then, is an attempt to put down on paper my best ideas about how we built the culture that is the bedrock of this place. This book isn’t just for Pixar people, entertainment executives, or animators.
It is for anyone who wants to work in an environment that fosters creativity and problem solving. My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in. My aim at Pixar— and at Disney Animation, which my longtime partner John Lasseter and I have also led since the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar in 2006—has been to enable our people to do their best work. 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. I’ve spent nearly forty years thinking about how to help smart, ambitious
people work effectively with one another. The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. 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. More interesting to me, though, are the blocks that
get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company. 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. In the coming pages, I will discuss many of the steps we follow at Pixar, but the most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot see. I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it. This book is organized into four sections—Getting Started, Protecting the
New, Building and Sustaining, and Testing What We Know. It is no memoir, but in order to understand the mistakes we made, the lessons we learned, and the ways we learned from them, it necessarily delves at times into my own history and that of Pixar. I have much to say about enabling groups to create something meaningful together and then protecting them from the destructive forces that loom even in the strongest companies. My hope is that by relating my search for the sources of confusion and delusion within Pixar and Disney Animation, I can help others avoid the pitfalls that impede and sometimes ruin businesses of all kinds. The key for me—what has kept me motivated in the nineteen years since Toy Story debuted—has been the realization that identifying these destructive forces isn’t merely a philosophical exercise. It is a crucial, central mission. In the wake of our earliest success, Pixar needed its leaders to sit up and pay attention. And that need for vigilance never goes away. This book, then, is about the ongoing work of paying attention—of leading by being self-aware, as managers and as companies. It is an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.
CHAPTER 1
ANIMATED
For thirteen years we had a table in the large conference room at Pixar that we call West One. Though it was beautiful, I grew to hate this table. It was long and skinny, like one of those things you’d see in a comedy sketch about an old wealthy couple that sits down for dinner—one person at either end, a candelabra in the middle—and has to shout to make conversation. The table had been chosen by a designer Steve Jobs liked, and it was elegant, all right—but it impeded our work. We’d hold regular meetings about our movies around that table—thirty of us
facing off in two long lines, often with more people seated along the walls—and everyone was so spread out that it was difficult to communicate. For those unlucky enough to be seated at the far ends, ideas didn’t flow because it was nearly impossible to make eye contact without craning your neck. Moreover, because it was important that the director and producer of the film in question be able to hear what everyone was saying, they had to be placed at the center of the table. So did Pixar’s creative leaders: John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative officer, and me, and a handful of our most experienced directors, producers, and writers. To ensure that these people were always seated together, someone began making place cards. We might as well have been at a formal dinner party. When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are
meaningless. That’s what I believe. But unwittingly, we were allowing this table —and the resulting place card ritual—to send a different message. The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, it implied, the more important—the more central—you must be. And the farther away, the less likely you were to speak up—your distance from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive. If the table was crowded, as it often was, still more people would sit in chairs around the edges of the room, creating yet a third tier of participants (those at the center of the table, those at the ends, and those not at the table at
all). Without intending to, we’d created an obstacle that discouraged people from jumping in. Over the course of a decade, we held countless meetings around this table in
this way—completely unaware of how doing so undermined our own core principles. Why were we blind to this? Because the seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders, including me. Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Those not sitting at the center of the table, meanwhile, saw quite clearly how it established a pecking order but presumed that we—the leaders—had intended that outcome. Who were they, then, to complain? It wasn’t until we happened to have a meeting in a smaller room with a square
table that John and I realized what was wrong. Sitting around that table, the interplay was better, the exchange of ideas more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. Every person there, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up. This was not only what we wanted, it was a fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position. At our long, skinny table, comfortable in our middle seats, we had utterly failed to recognize that we were behaving contrary to that basic tenet. Over time, we’d fallen into a trap. Even though we were conscious that a room’s dynamics are critical to any good discussion, even though we believed that we were constantly on the lookout for problems, our vantage point blinded us to what was right before our eyes. Emboldened by this new insight, I went to our facilities department. “Please,”
I said, “I don’t care how you do it, but get that table out of there.” I wanted something that could be arranged into a more intimate square, so people could address each other directly and not feel like they didn’t matter. A few days later, as a critical meeting on an upcoming movie approached, our new table was installed, solving the problem. Still, interestingly, there were remnants of that problem that did not
immediately vanish just because we’d solved it. For example, the next time I walked into West One, I saw the brand-new table, arranged—as requested—in a more intimate square that made it possible for more people to interact at once. But the table was adorned with the same old place cards! While we’d fixed the key problem that had made place cards seem necessary, the cards themselves had become a tradition that would continue until we specifically dismantled it. This wasn’t as troubling an issue as the table itself, but it was something we had to address because cards implied hierarchy, and that was precisely what we were trying to avoid. When Andrew Stanton, one of our directors, entered the meeting room that morning, he grabbed several place cards and began randomly moving
them around, narrating as he went. “We don’t need these anymore!” he said in a way that everyone in the room grasped. Only then did we succeed in eliminating this ancillary problem. This is the nature of management. Decisions are made, usually for good
reasons, which in turn prompt other decisions. So when problems arise—and they always do—disentangling them is not as simple as correcting the original error. Often, finding a solution is a multi-step endeavor. There is the problem you know you are trying to solve—think of that as an oak tree—and then there are all the other problems—think of these as saplings—that sprouted from the acorns that fell around it. And these problems remain after you cut the oak tree down. Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have
existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is. Pixar today is managed according to this principle, but in a way I’ve been searching all my life for better ways of seeing. It began decades before Pixar even existed.
When I was a kid, I used to plunk myself down on the living room floor of my family’s modest Salt Lake City home a few minutes before 7 P.M. every Sunday and wait for Walt Disney. Specifically, I’d wait for him to appear on our black- and-white RCA with its tiny 12-inch screen. Even from a dozen feet away—the accepted wisdom at the time was that viewers should put one foot between them and the TV for every inch of screen—I was transfixed by what I saw. Each week, Walt Disney himself opened the broadcast of The Wonderful
World of Disney. Standing before me in suit and tie, like a kindly neighbor, he would demystify the Disney magic. He’d explain the use of synchronized sound in Steamboat Willie or talk about the importance of music in Fantasia. 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. He’d introduce the television audience to trailblazers such as Max Fleischer, of Koko the Clown and Betty Boop fame, and Winsor McCay, who made Gertie the Dinosaur—the first animated film to feature a character that expressed emotion—in 1914. He’d gather a group of his animators, colorists, and storyboard artists to explain how they made Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck come to life. Each week, Disney created a made-up world, used cutting-edge technology to enable it, and then told us how he’d done it. 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. Wild-haired and iconic, Einstein dared to bend the implications of what we thought we knew. He solved the biggest puzzles of all and, in doing so, changed our understanding of reality. Both Einstein and Disney inspired me, but Disney affected me more because
of his weekly visits to my family’s living room. “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are,” his TV show’s theme song would announce as a baritone-voiced narrator promised: “Each week, as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you.… ” Then the narrator would tick them off: Frontierland (“tall tales and true from the legendary past”), Tomorrowland (“the promise of things to come”), Adventureland (“the wonder world of nature’s own realm”), and Fantasyland (“the happiest kingdom of them all”). I loved the idea that animation could take me places I’d never been. But the land I most wanted to learn about was the one occupied by the innovators at Disney who made these animated films. Between 1950 and 1955, Disney made three movies we consider classics
today: Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp. More than half a century later, we all remember the glass slipper, the Island of Lost Boys, and that scene where the cocker spaniel and the mutt slurp spaghetti. But few grasp how technically sophisticated these movies were. Disney’s animators were at the forefront of applied technology; instead of merely using existing methods, they were inventing ones of their own. They had to develop the tools to perfect sound and color, to use blue screen matting and multiplane cameras and xerography. Every time some technological breakthrough occurred, Walt Disney incorporated it and then talked about it on his show in a way that highlighted the relationship between technology and art. I was too young to realize such a synergy was groundbreaking. To me, it just made sense that they belonged together. Watching Disney one Sunday evening in April of 1956, I experienced
something that would define my professional life. What exactly it was is difficult to describe except to say that I felt something fall into place inside my head. That night’s episode was called “Where Do the Stories Come From?” and Disney kicked it off by praising his animators’ knack for turning everyday occurrences into cartoons. That night, though, it wasn’t Disney’s explanation that
pulled me in but what was happening on the screen as he spoke. An artist was drawing Donald Duck, giving him a jaunty costume and a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy with which to woo Daisy. Then, as the artist’s pencil moved around the page, Donald came to life, putting up his dukes to square off with the pencil lead, then raising his chin to allow the artist to give him a bow tie. The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes
you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it’s a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job. It’s not just lines on paper anymore; it’s a living, feeling entity. This is what I experienced that night, for the first time, as I watched Donald leap off the page. The transformation from a static line drawing to a fully dimensional, animated image was sleight of hand, nothing more, but the mystery of how it was done—not just the technical process but the way the art was imbued with such emotion—was the most interesting problem I’d ever considered. I wanted to climb through the TV screen and be part of this world.
The mid-1950s and early 1960s were, of course, a time of great prosperity and industry in the United States. Growing up in Utah in a tight-knit Mormon community, my four younger brothers and sisters and I felt that anything was possible. Because the adults we knew had all lived through the Depression, World War II, and then the Korean War, this period felt to them like the calm after a thunderstorm. I remember the optimistic energy—an eagerness to move forward that was
enabled and supported by a wealth of emerging technologies. It was boom time in America, with manufacturing and home construction at an all-time high. Banks were offering loans and credit, which meant more and more people could own a new TV, house, or Cadillac. There were amazing new appliances like disposals that ate your garbage and machines that washed your dishes, although I certainly did my share of cleaning them by hand. The first organ transplants were performed in 1954; the first polio vaccine came a year later; in 1956, the term artificial intelligence entered the lexicon. The future, it seemed, was already here. Then, when I was twelve, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite—
Sputnik 1—into earth’s orbit. This was huge news, not just in the scientific and political realms but in my sixth grade classroom at school, where the morning routine was interrupted by a visit from the principal, whose grim expression told us that our lives had changed forever. Since we’d been taught that the
Communists were the enemy and that nuclear war could be waged at the touch of a button, the fact that they’d beaten us into space seemed pretty scary—proof that they had the upper hand. The United States government’s response to being bested was to create
something called ARPA, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Though it was housed within the Defense Department, its mission was ostensibly peaceful: to support scientific researchers in America’s universities in the hopes of preventing what it termed “technological surprise.” By sponsoring our best minds, the architects of ARPA believed, we’d come up with better answers. Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter. ARPA would have a profound effect on America, leading directly to the computer revolution and the Internet, among countless other innovations. There was a sense that big things were happening in America, with much more to come. Life was full of possibility. Still, while my family was middle-class, our outlook was shaped by my
father’s upbringing. Not that he talked about it much. Earl Catmull, the son of an Idaho dirt farmer, was one of fourteen kids, five of whom had died as infants. His mother, raised by
