Creativity, Inc.

"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

Catmull earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Utah, ran Lucasfilm's computer division and turned it into Pixar when Steve Jobs bought it in 1986. He was cofounder and president of Pixar and, after Disney acquired it in 2006, also president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, until his retirement in 2019. That year he received the Turing Award for his contributions to computer animation. He wrote the book with journalist Amy Wallace to explain how to build a culture that produces creative work in a sustained way.

On candor, the book recommends:

• A Braintrust. A group of experienced directors and storytellers reviews each film in progress every few months and says honestly what isn't working. It has no authority to impose solutions: the director decides what to do with the notes.
• Accept that the first draft is bad. Catmull says it bluntly: early on, all Pixar films suck. The job is to take them from bad to good, and that only happens if someone dares to say it.
• Criticize the work, not the person. Candor has to aim at the work and not at whoever created it, so nobody gets defensive.
• Show unfinished work. In the daily reviews animators show incomplete progress, which removes the fear of being seen half-done and speeds up corrections.

On fear and failure, the lessons are:

• Failure is part of inventing. An organization that punishes it stops trying new things. What you have to do is study it without looking for culprits: which assumption failed and what support was missing.
• The manager's job isn't to prevent risk. Their job is to make it safe to take.
• Protect what's new. Catmull calls the newborn idea, fragile and easy to discard, the "ugly baby," and the operation's pressure to produce the "hungry beast." If the beast always wins, new ideas don't have time to mature.

On people and organization:

• People first, then ideas. A good team fixes a mediocre idea; a mediocre team ruins a good one.
• Listen to the whole organization. On Notes Day, Pixar closed the studio for a day so that all employees could openly discuss the company's problems. From it came changes in leader development and internal communication.
• Don't copy the culture, rebuild it. On arriving at Disney Animation, Catmull and John Lasseter didn't try to turn it into another Pixar. They focused on reducing fear and recovering candor, and the studio went back to producing hits like Tangled and Frozen.

The concept to master is that in every company there are unseen forces: problems the leader doesn't see because people don't dare tell them, especially to someone with authority. The more successful a company is, the easier it is to believe it knows everything. That's why candor doesn't happen on its own; you have to design spaces, like the Braintrust, where telling the truth is part of the routine.

A simple place to begin: put together your own Braintrust. Choose a product, a campaign or a plan in progress, gather three or four people with judgment who don't report to the person in charge, and set three rules: the notes are about the work, nobody imposes solutions and the owner decides what to do with what they heard. Schedule the first session this week and repeat it every month.

As a founder it will help you create a culture where problems are voiced early, while they're still cheap to fix. It will also help you remember that your role isn't to have the best ideas, but to build the team that improves them.