Creativity inc. - Managing Creativity in Business
Visual Summary for Ed Catmull's Bestseller book - part 1
I'm back after some vacation and good rest with the family.
Summer is always a great time for me to read more and get inspired. I have found some new interesting books that I may share next, but today we are going to start a visual summary series for the book:
Creativity inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace.
Ed is the co-founder and former CEO of Pixar, his book as become a reference especially in industries where there is a need to balance Creativity and Business goals.
To stay on theme, I have challenged myself to create small animations for each chapters, hope you will enjoy the summary 🙂.
Intro
The book starts by describing Ed’s journey from being captivated by the technological challenge of creating the first computer-animated feature film, to discovering a new purpose:
Discovering how leaders become blind to the threats endangering an enterprise's well-being.
Establishing a successful, sustainable creative culture.
To achieve this, he starts with three core beliefs:
1. 💡🙋♂️ Everybody has the potential to be creative
2. 🚧🚧 There are many blocks to creativity
3. 🏃♂️🏃♀️ There are active steps leaders can take to protect the creative process
Chapter 1 - Animated
Steve job’s problematic table…
The first chapter start with an interesting story illustrating the impact of seemingly trivial details — here, a table— on group dynamics.
Picture a room, with a beautiful, massive rectangle table, carefully chosen by Steve Job’s favorite designer. The perfect place for Pixar to hold collaborative, cross-functional meetings. Right… ?
❌The problem: Those on the edge of the table struggled to hear and participate in the conversations happening in the middle… Moreover, to make sure key participants could hear everything, they were placed in the center, reinforcing a hierarchical structure.
That table had to go!
🟩Ed Catmull decided to remove the cumbersome table and replace it with a new smaller one, without defined reserved places. Finally, all the team could express themselves and share their ideas freely, contributing to the success of the meetings !
First Computer animation
The chapter goes on to give us more of the author’s backstory:
As a kid, Ed was fascinated by Walt Disney and the blend of technology and art, but not talented enough to become an animator… He therefore decides to pursue physics and computer science.
After graduating, he worked on a Phd at the University of Utah Computer Science Department resulting in the first full-length feature computer generated animation (see above), and many innovations (Z-buffer, texture mapping), but also a practical experience of what a successful group look like:
A talented diverse group, with a lot of freedom to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
And that is it for today!
If you know people that would enjoy this series, here is a sharing link:
I just finished illustrating the 99 cognitive bias from the book “The Art of Thinking Clearly”, if you missed those posts you can check them here:
Cheers!
The next part is available here:
