Unlocking Pixar's Creativity

了解⽪皮克斯创新的秘密
Understanding the Creative Secrets of
Wednesday, July 30th Presented by Charlie

To learn about the secrets of Pixar, you only need to speak to one person.
Secrets of Pixar’s Creative Success
His name is Ed Catmull.

Pixar Co-Founder Ed Catmull
• A legend in the field of computer graphics.
Computer Science major and a Ph.D
• Co-founded Pixar with Steve Jobs and John
Lasseter and has been its president for 30 years
• Became President of Disney Animation and
brought it back to glory with Frozen, the highest
grossing animated movie of all time ($1.2 billion)
• Created “The Hand” in 1972 and invented Z-Buffering,
among other industry innovations

Creativity, Inc.
Ed Catmull spent 20 years realizing his dream to
create the world’s first animated feature film.
After achieving this goal, he spent 10 years making
sure Pixar was strong.
After achieving that goal, he spent 10 years making
sure Disney was strong.
Then, he decided to write a book about everything
he’s learned. That book was the first look “inside”
Pixar, and is called Creativity, Inc.

40 Years of Ed Catmull
20 YEARS 10 YEARS 10 YEARS
Fighting for the first animated
feature film
Strengthening
Pixar
Strengthening
Disney

What’s So Special About Pixar?
• Generated $8.5 billion in 14 films with an
average grossing of $600 million
• Bought by Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion
• Has won 27 Academy Awards (aka Oscars)
• Has NINE number-1 hit movies in a row, which no
studio has ever done before
• But the most important thing is…

What’s So Special About Pixar?
Pixar has perfected the science and art of
creativity inside a large organization.
Pixar has grown large and become
more creative, not less creative.
How did they do this?

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.
Ed Catmull

8 Secrets to Pixar’s
Legendary Creativity
What makes Pixar so different?

#1. Don’t Work Too Hard

#1: Don’t Work Too Hard
• Managers believe that more hours
means more revenue, but they’re
wrong
• Working too many hours depletes
both productivity and creativity
• At Pixar and Blizzard, you will get in
trouble for working too many hours
Pixar: 40 hour work week except
pre-release crunch
Blizzard: 40 hour workweek
Industrial Light & Magic: 45 hours

If we are in this for the long haul, we have to take care of ourselves,
support healthy habits, and encourage our employees to have fulfilling
lives outside of work. Moreover, everyone’s home lives change as they—
and their children, if they have them—age. This means creating a culture
in which taking maternity or paternity leave is not seen as an impediment
to career advancement. That may not sound revolutionary, but at many
companies, parents know that taking that leave comes at a cost; a truly
committed employee, they are wordlessly told, wants to be at work. That’s
not true at Pixar.
Ed Catmull

Supporting your employees means encouraging them to strike a balance not
merely by saying, “Be balanced!” but also by making it easier for them to
achieve balance. (Having a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a soccer field
on-site tells our workers that we value exercise and a life beyond the desk.) But
leadership also means paying close attention to ever-changing dynamics in the
workplace. For example, when our younger employees— those without families
— work longer hours than those who are parents, we must be mindful not to
compare the output of these two groups without being mindful of the context.
I’m not talking just about the health of our employees here; I’m talking about
their long-term productivity and happiness. Investing in this stuff pays dividends
down the line.
Ed Catmull

Lesson: Just working hard is never the
key to success. In creative industries,
working too hard can make you fail.

#2: Don’t Focus on Preventing Problems
• Problems will happen naturally, no
person or company will stop them
• Problems aren’t necessarily a bad
thing. Use them to become
stronger
• When people are worried about
making mistakes, their
performance suffers greatly

“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.”
Ed Catmull

Lesson: Problems naturally occur. Focus
on how you respond to problems, rather
than how you can prevent them.

#3: Encourage Personality
• Personalization builds empathy, which is
the power to love something
• Steve Jobs helped design Pixar’s
headquarters, but employees build their
own spaces, which they take great pride
in
• Pixar believes that a boring office reflects
boring people who lack inspiration

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.
Ed Catmull

Ten images taken from inside
Pixar to demonstrate.

Inside Pixar, you can feel
everyone’s personality.
Nothing about the office communicates
“this is a normal place of work.”

Lesson: Everyone has interests. Encourage people
in your team to show off what inspires them.

#4: The Most Important Thing is How
Your Product Makes People Feel
• It’s not a feature set or technology,
it’s how people emotionally
respond
• Machine Zone & Gabriel Leydon
promote this idea in GoW
• When you make a great product,
people will talk to others how it
makes them feel, not any of the
technical details

The first principle we adopted after Toy Story was “Story Is King,” by which we meant
that we would let nothing— not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—
get in the way of our story. We took pride in the fact that reviewers talked mainly
about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that
enabled us to get it up on the screen.
Ed Catmull

With the addition of Wheezy and Jessie, Woody’s choice became more fraught: He
could stay with someone he loves, knowing that he will eventually be discarded, or he
could flee to a world where he could be pampered forever, but without the love that
he was built for. That is a real choice, a real question. The way the creative team
phrased it to each other was: Would you choose to live forever without love? When
you can feel the agony of that choice, you have a movie.
Ed Catmull

What’s more important and why: an
amazing idea or an amazing team?
And now a quick question:

#5: People Are Most Important
• Strong teams can generate an
infinite number of amazing ideas
• Having amazing ideas doesn’t
matter if you don’t have an
amazing team to execute it
“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.”
Ed Catmull

• Released in 1999,
delivered on time
• Made $500 million (on a
$90m budget)
• $300m in first weekend,
10x Toy Story
• Won 2 Oscars
• Considered one of the
best animated films of all
time
• Almost destroyed Pixar

Toy Story 2 was a wakeup call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never
again outweigh the needs of our people. We needed to do more to keep them
healthy . As soon as we wrapped the film, we set about addressing the needs of our
injured, stressed-out employees and coming up with strategies to prevent future
deadline pressures from hurting our workers again. These strategies went beyond
ergonomically designed workstations, yoga classes, and physical therapy. Toy Story 2
was a case study in how something that is usually considered a plus— a motivated,
workaholic workforce pulling together to make a deadline— could destroy itself if left
unchecked.
Ed Catmull

Here, in rapid succession, we’d had two failures and one success, all of them random,
all of them unforeseen. The real lesson of the event, though, was in how we dealt
with its aftermath. In short, we didn’t waste time playing the blame game. After the
loss of the film, our list of priorities, in order, were: (1) Restore the film; (2) Fix our
backup systems; (3) Install precautionary restrictions to make it much more difficult to
access the deletion command directly.
Notably, one item was not on our list: Find the person responsible who typed the
wrong command and punish him or her.
Ed Catmull

Lesson: Getting the right people is more
important than getting the right idea. Take
care of people and they will produce for you.

#6: Winning Companies Destroy
• When you become fearful of trying
new things, creativity dies
• When team members feel fear, it is
never unreasonable
Fear and Build Trust
If you aren’t experiencing failure,
then you are making a far worse
mistake: You are being driven by
the desire to avoid it. And, for
leaders especially, this strategy—
trying to avoid failure by out-thinking
it— dooms you to fail.
Ed Catmull

#6: Winning Companies Destroy Fear
Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their
trustworthiness, over time, through their actions— and the best way to do that is by
responding well to failure. If there is fear, there is a reason— our job is to find the
reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the
ability to recover.
Ed Catmull
and Build Trust

Lesson: Discover and eliminate fear by being
honest and earning trust.

#7: Don’t Abandon Your Values
• Have values, and don’t abandon them
when facing challenges
• Values are more important than goals.
Quality and originality are more
important than deadlines or revenue.
If you aren’t experiencing failure,
then you are making a far worse
mistake: You are being driven by
the desire to avoid it. And, for
leaders especially, this strategy—
trying to avoid failure by out-thinking
it— dooms you to fail.
Ed Catmull

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.
Ed Catmull

Lesson: Commitment to quality and values is
more important to long-term success than
other goals.

• Pixar values originality and quality over
everything else. They share this value
with Apple.
• Originality requires a lot of research.
Research trips are now part of Pixar’s
production process.
#8: Be Original
When filmmakers, industrial designers, software
designers, or people in any other creative
profession merely cut up and reassemble what
has come before, it gives the illusion of
creativity, but it is craft without art.
Ed Catmull

Even though copying what’s come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it
appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe— to succeed with minimal risk
—can infect not just individuals but also entire companies. If we sense that our
structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open— without
destroying ourselves in the process. The question of how to do this must continually
be addressed—there is no single answer— because conditions and people are
constantly in flux. Whenever filmmakers make a derivative presentation to John, he
will often stop them, urging them to slow down, and look beyond what they think
they already know. “You must,” he tells them, “go out and do research.”
Ed Catmull
#8: Be Original

Lesson: Copying can feel like the safe choice,
but it’s not. True success demands originality
in creative industries.

Overview:
#4: The Most Important Thing is How Your Product Makes People Feel
#6: Winning Companies Destroy Fear and Build Trust
#8: Be Original

About Creativity, Inc.
“Just might be the best business book ever written.”
Forbes
“The most practical and deep book ever written by a
practitioner on the topic of innovation.”
Harvard Business School
“Might be the most thoughtful management book
ever.”
Fast Company

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