How to unlock creativity in the workplace – advice from Pixar CEO

Photo credit: Niranjan.

How do you manage creativity? The question in and of itself sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, maybe a pithy canned line from one of many self-help books.

In this case, though, the person exploring this idea is Ed Catmull, one of the co-founders of Pixar who helped pioneer the technology to make (and fulfill his dream of making) the first full-length animated film. Today, he’s the CEO of Pixar and Disney Animated Studios. That’s enough to make me sit down and listen to his book, which has an intriguing title, if a bit of a mouthful.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, written together with Amy Wallace, is aware of what it is, though – at the end of the day, it’s an advice book on management. Its authors try to get the story across in the most entertaining way possible, beginning with the way the Pixar campus is today, one of those fun and innovative offices (think Google) that makes us all wish that we worked there. Once I was adequately jealous, the book took me back to when Pixar was a startup and Ed was just a computer science graduate student with a dream.

From there, it reads much like one of Pixar’s adventure stories with Ed as the protagonist with a lot to learn, animator and storyteller John Lasseter as his partner-in-crime, and mentors throughout.

“George had a fondness for folksy analogies that sought to describe, neatly, the mess of life,” Ed says about George Lucas, equating him appropriately to a Yoda-like figure. Steve Jobs is a background character but also larger than life – the book, published in April 2014, comes soon after his death. Creativity, Inc. is Ed’s narrative of Pixar, from when it was only an abstract idea in Ed’s head to where it is today. Ed’s management tips and personal truths are woven throughout.

It becomes clear in the course of the book that the true impediment to any company – startup or corporation – is human insecurity. Good management, surmises Ed, means combatting that insecurity at every level and keeping balance.

See: What superbosses do to energize talent – and bossy bosses don’t

Believe to achieve

Photo credit: Ed Bierman

Insecurity is not the nature of people, but it does tend to be the nature of company culture, Creativity, Inc. puts forth. As an example, Ed talks about seeing drawings in an elementary school and how the fifth grade paintings, though made by more advanced students, were much more lacking in creativity than those made by the first and second graders.

We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in a myriad unseen ways.

He proposes that as we grow up, we become more self-conscious and more likely to stifle creativity. Art, he says, is not a way of doing but rather a way of seeing.

The advice can come off as almost hipster in nature, especially coming from a company full of artists. But, if you can sit through that (and laugh – it gets quite humorous at times as Ed pokes fun at his own youthful mistakes) the book soon portrays that “seeing” within a company is vital. Management is always going to have blind spots which it can overcome by allowing employees’ input.

Balancing act