The Braintrust meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk.

One of Pixar’s key mechanisms is the Braintrust, which we rely on to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. So how can a manager ensure that his or her working group, department, or company embraces candor? By putting mechanisms in place that explicitly say it is valuable. Lack of candor leads to dysfunctional environments. Candor is the key to collaborating effectively. Our decision making is better when we draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group. First, there is a first-person piece by Catmull in Fast Company: Inside the Pixar Braintrust:Ī hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. So when I saw that Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, had co-written a book called “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration” (published April 8th), I immediately zeroed in on it.Īs a taste of what the book offers, here are some tidbits I’ve aggregated for you. Not only because they have produced some of my favorite movies including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Wall-E and Up, but because of how they do it, their utter and absolute commitment to story, and as I discovered in my interview with Mary Coleman, head of their story department, their affection for great characters.

Creativity, Inc.I find Pixar fascinating. Now, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques, honed over years, that have made Pixar so widely admired - and so profitable.

Since then, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such films as Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner twenty-seven Academy Awards. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged an early partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Summary: As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the world's first computer-animated movie.

Creativity inc book pixar