Creativity, Inc.

Rich in wisdom and deeply humanistic, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull is a life-long student of what makes organisations ‘work', and this book is an absolute treasure trove of insights and learnings. Aside from that it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes account that goes a very long way to explain how Pixar so consistently makes such brilliant films. Essential reading for anyone interested in management and innovation.

Very good retrospective on Pixar, with a lot of great advice on management and creativity. Sometimes gets a little too much into the “and then we solved it, aren't we great” side of things, but that's really just a minor quibble. The afterword, on working with Steve Jobs, is better than the entire Steve Jobs authorized biography.

The full title for this one is “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration”. Hearing the title and knowing it was written by Ed Catmull, one of the cofounders of Pixar, was enough to draw me in. As someone who works in technology, but also leans towards ways of managing projects, this one hit on a long list of points that were relavant to working at Code School. Although on a completely different level, the way Pixar puts out pictures each year with multiple teams and different departments is similar to Code Schools monthly course structure. Page after page I saw problems that were familiar to me, and how they solved them at Pixar.

I find rating a book like this difficult because a lot of the opinions expressed in it around how to foster an effective working environment are already practiced at my work place, so I find myself without a lot of new ideas coming out of it. I'm not sure if these things were as widely adopted six years ago when they were written, but they certainly are now.

The book is well written and charming though, and provides some neat insights to the process at Pixar over the years (though again there are a few stories I had already known, perhaps just from other sources referencing this book).