Creativity, Inc.

He said, “When I don’t see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be. (Location 752)

Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse—like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish—can teach you crucial things about your (Location 803)

environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world. (Location 804)

His reasoning went like this: If Microsoft was willing to go to $90 million, then we must be worth hanging on to. It was difficult—and enervating—to watch this dance. (Location 896)

Steve to know that he wasn’t insensitive at his core—the problem was that he had not yet figured out how to behave in a way that let everyone see that. (Location 907)

I have much to say about Steve’s transformation and the role Pixar played in it, but for now, I will simply assert that failure made him better, wiser, and kinder. (Location 973)

For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what? (Location 1009)

Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, “from suck to not-suck. (Location 1427)

By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential. (Location 1472)

‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move. (Location 1732)

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. (Location 2112)

In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. (Location 2165)

As much as I admire the efficiency of the caterpillar in its cocoon, I do not believe that creative products should be developed in a vacuum (arguably, that was one of the mistakes we made on the film about blue-footed newts). I know some people who like to keep their gem completely to themselves while they polish it. But allowing this kind of behavior isn’t protection. In fact, it can be the opposite: a failure to protect your employees from themselves. Because if history is any guide, some are diligently trying to polish a brick. (Location 2214)

In the end, I had to give the “Of course we will continue to change” speech three times before it finally sunk in. (Location 2280)

This idea—that change is our friend because only from struggle does clarity emerge—makes many people uncomfortable, and I understand why. Whether you’re coming up with a fashion line or an ad campaign or a car design, the creative process is an expensive undertaking, and blind alleys and unforeseen snafus inevitably drive up your costs. The stakes are so high, and the crises that pop up can be so unpredictable, that we try to exert control. The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micromanaging. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity. (Location 2379)

There is a third concept, also from the world of mathematics, that can help: stochastic self-similarity. Stochastic simply means random or chance; self-similarity describes the phenomenon—found in everything from stock market fluctuations to seismic activity to rainfall—of patterns that look the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification. (Location 2482)

If we can agree that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a complete picture of what is going on at any given time in any given company, it becomes even harder when you are successful. That’s because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way. There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right. (Location 2694)

If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity. (Location 2699)

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. (Location 2754)

And the fourth idea is that people who work or live together—people like Dick and Anne, for example—have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply (sometimes hopelessly) intertwined with one another. If my wife and I had been traveling with just Dick or just Anne, he or she almost certainly would have responded appropriately, but because they were together, their combined model was more complex—and more limiting—than either of their models would have been on its own. (Location 2907)

“She looks like she’s stepping more catlike than heavy-bear-like,” he said. “I like the overall speed, but I’m not feeling the weight. She’s walking like a ninja.” Everybody nodded and—note taken—they moved on. (Location 2958)

Note: Interesting The feeling of repetition, like making the egg sushi in Jiro should be drilled into people So that when you inevitably have to redo something it doesn't feel like a waste or like shitty work, but like part of the process Like annealing a sword How can that be more ingrained into culture? It's more than craftsmanship, or rather a part of craftsmanship

the kitchen of a high-end French restaurant, for example, so you might think the obsessive specificity of Ratatouille’s kitchen scenes—the chefs’ clogs clacking on the black-and-white tile floors, the way they hold their arms when they cut up vegetables, or how they organize their work spaces—would be lost on the audience. But what we’ve found is that when we are accurate, the audiences can tell. It just feels right. (Location 3022)

It wouldn’t be the first time we would find someone who was able to invent wildly creative elements but was unable to solve the problems of story—the central and most important creative challenge. So we pulled the plug. (Location 3198)

Note: Yet another example of importance of barrative

“Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones. (Location 3201)

We begin life, as children, being open to the ideas of others because we need to be open to learn. Most of what children encounter, after all, are things they’ve never seen before. The child has no choice but to embrace the new. If this openness is so wonderful, however, why do we lose it as we grow up? Where, along the way, do we turn from the wide-eyed child into the adult who fears surprises and has all the answers and seeks to control all outcomes? (Location 3356)

Note: Super similar to zen notion of beginners mind I love how related concepts of books pop up with each other

But as I’ve talked to my colleagues who perform a variety of different jobs, I’ve come to respect that the most important thing about a mental model is that it enables whoever relies on it to get their job—whatever it is—done. The uncreated is a vast, empty space. This emptiness is so scary that most hold on to what they know, making minor adjustments to what they (Location 3515)

I’ve now described several models, and the thing I believe they have in common is the search for an unseen destination—for land across the ocean (Andrew), for light at the end of the tunnel (Pete), for a way out of the maze (Rich), for the mountain itself (Michael). (Location 3520)

There’s something else that bears repeating here: 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. (Location 4433)

Brad Bird remembers a meeting during the making of The Incredibles, soon after he joined the studio, when Steve hurt his feelings by saying that some of the Incredibles artwork looked “kind of Saturday morning”—a reference to the low-budget cartoons that Hanna-Barbera and others produced. “In my world, that’s kind of like saying, ‘Your mama sleeps around,’ ” Brad recalls. “I was seething. (Location 4538)

Whenever offering a note, he always began the same way: “I’m not really a filmmaker, so you can ignore everything I say.… ” Then he would proceed, with startling efficiency, to diagnose the problem precisely. Steve focused on the problem itself, not the filmmakers, which made his critiques all the more powerful. (Location 4622)