HAPPY SUNDAY: CREATIVITY, INC.

I have just finished reading Creativity, Inc. It is a fascinating book; a book for anyone who wants to know how to lead their employees to release their extraordinary potential, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, ideas and innovation, a book that proves once again that you can achieve great things if you focus relentlessly on culture, leadership and people.

As a young man, Ed Catmull dreamed about making the world’s first computer-animated movie. He developed that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah and went on to build a partnership with George Lucas, of Star Wars fame and founded Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. He went on to lead the redevelopment of Disney Animation to create arguably the best films those of us who love cartoons have ever seen.

Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and win twenty-seven Academy Awards. The storytelling, the plots, the emotions mark them out as simply extraordinary and Disney's Tangled and Frozen raised the bar for what was possible! 

Disney started it but Pixar and Disney together show us what is possible and what creativity really is. Creativity, Inc. takes us into the heart of Pixar Animation Studios—into the story meetings, the postmortems, and the ‘Braintrust’ sessions where the outstanding and the extraordinary are born. It is fundamentally a book about leadership, culture and people; about how to build and sustain a culture that creates magic—but it is also a statement of what it takes to bring out the best in all of us!