Book #69: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

The subtitle of this book is too long for me to bother typing it out in the header of this blog post, but the full title of the book is Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. And like all good subtitles do, that gives you a good sense of what this book is really about. Ed Catmull, the author, is the president of Pixar and Disney Animation, so it seems like he should have an enormous amount of experience with fostering and working with creativity and trying to create a workplace that is friendly to those goals. He says up front that this book is not a memoir--he uses his experiences at Pixar and Lucasfilm and other exciting places to provide examples, but the guiding principle of the book is his ideas about how to foster creativity in the workplace. And I totally get that, and why that is an important book to write. But I was mainly interested in the memoir bits--the stories about his experiences at Pixar, and how they work together to create these movies that we all love--and ended up skimming through all the theoretical talk about how those ideas apply and work, etc. So although he doesn't promise a memoir, I wish he had because those parts were so much more interesting (to me) than his discussions of why creativity is important, and what managers can do to help their employees to be more creative. And honestly, a lot of his suggestions seem pretty common-sense to me--but that's probably a good indication of how important they really are (and probably an indication of my little knowledge of a workplace environment). Overall, I'm not sure why I had to wait for almost two months for this one to become available at the library, except for the superstar author, but it was a reasonably interesting read.