Book Notes: I’ve decided to read at least one book per month and post my notes here as a concrete deliverable. This is part of a habit I’d like to cultivate to read more books, academic papers, and industry blogs.

Keeping up with this pace has been difficult, partly because writing notes takes a fair amount of time I didn’t account for. But let’s see how out-of-sync I get.

I also find myself getting frustrated with Kindle’s highlight and note limits (10%). It means it’s harder to use highlights (for later review) in place of taking actual notes while reading.

Next book: No Rules Rules

Summary

The book: Catmull, E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration

I’ve been participating in a book club at work, and this was one of our recent reads. 1

In this book, Ed Catmull, the co-founder and technical expert behind Pixar, shares his journey to create the world’s best computer-animated films and create a company culture that can nurture creativity and innovation. He argues that Pixar’s core principles—such as removing hierarchy and oversight, valuing teams over ideas, pursuing quality over efficency, encouraging candor and ownership, balancing exploration and exploitation (or, as he calls it, feeding the Hungry Beast vs. the Ugly Baby), and embracing change, uncertainty, and failure—were not only the key to Pixar’s success but also allowed Catmull, Lasseter, and Jobs to turn around Disney Animation (whose Frozen movies have surpassed even Pixar’s movies in sales). 2

Catmull’s background

In 1969, Catmull graduated from University of Utah with degrees in Physics and CS. He actually intended to pursue computer language design in grad school, but a chance encounter with Ivan Sutherland led him to join the computer graphics group instead. This put him in impressive company, including Jim Clark (founder of SGI and Netscape), John Warnock (founder of Adobe), and Alan Kay (pioneer of OO programming and GUIs). The fertile environment helped shape his vision to combine his childhood loves of Disney (art) and Einstein (science) to create computer-generated animation films.

As an engineer I was very interested in the details of his career path and the rise of Pixar, but it’s not the key lesson of the book so I’ll skip them here.

Values and Principles

Removing hierarchy and oversight

Catmull’s first role out of graduate school was to hire and lead a research lab to develop computer animation. Using his graduate academic lab as a model, he created a flat-hierarchy environment and a culture of sharing results with academia in conferences and journals, which was counter to most industry labs at the time. He discovered that this attracted highly talented people, whom he hired even when he feared he could be making himself obsolete. Although he eventually had to create management layers at Pixar, he strove to keep the sense of hierarchy as low as possible.

  • About a grand meeting table that scaled poorly as Pixar grew larger:

    The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, it implied, the more important—the more central—you must be. And the farther away, the less likely you were to speak up—your distance from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive.

  • On the temptation of oversight:

    The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micromanaging. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity.

Teams over ideas

  • On how a small change to Toy Story 2 (adding the Wheezy character) transformed the emotion of the film:

    The gestation of Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that were vital to Pixar’s evolution. Remember that the spine of the story—Woody’s dilemma, to stay or to go—was the same before and after the Braintrust worked it over. One version didn’t work at all, and the other was deeply affecting. Why? Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: 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. … Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

  • Teams over individuals, too:

    Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.

Pursuing quality over efficiency

In an industry where innovation, rather than output volume, is the most important factor, Catmull exhorts pursuit of quality over efficiency.

He cites Edward Deming’s revitalization of Japanese manufacturing and the subsequent Kaizen system as a source of inspiration:

To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Encouraging candor and ownership

In business valuing “honesty” is a truism. So Catmull says we should aim even further, for “candor”, which has less of a moral connotation and highlights the flip side: sometimes, being candid can hurt some feelings, but this is worth it in the long run.

One of the main ways that candid feedback is provided at Pixar is through the “Braintrust”, a group of top creatives in the company who provide guidance and candid feedback at several milestones in the development of a film. While showing progress updates to leaders is a common business practice, one of the key features of the braintrust is that directors are not obligated to implement their feedback, as that would reduce their sense of ownership. Their power comes from trust, rather than from authority.

  • On the Braintrust process:

    As I’ve discussed, first we draw storyboards of the script and then edit them together with temporary voices and music to make a crude mock-up of the film, known as reels. Then the Braintrust watches this version of the movie and discusses what’s not ringing true, what could be better, what’s not working at all. Notably, they do not prescribe how to fix the problems they diagnose.

  • On good notes:

    A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn’t make demands; it doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. “I’m writhing with boredom,” is not a good note. … every note we give is in the service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies.

The Hungry Beast vs. the Ugly Baby

In business, and in the field of reinforcement learning, there is a well-known concept of exploration vs exploitation. When we’re new to a town we need to try out new restaurants to find ones we like (explore). But at some point, if we care at all about what we eat, we should start returning to the ones we know we like so far (exploit). The key is balance; too much exploration means we waste time and don’t get to eat what we like, and too little exploration means we might settle too early on a sub-par restaurant. Or, consider a woodpecker: too much exploration would be like a woodpecker pecking each of 1000 trees once, but too little exploration might result in the woodpecker starving on a telephone pole.

Catmull has a more colorful metaphor: he envisions all of the company’s known success modes as “the hungry beast”, and feeding it becomes the company’s main goal. This is good because it drives most of the profits. However, if the company gets too efficient at it, that will stifle the creation of new first-draft ideas, which he calls “ugly babies”.

  • The Hungry Beast:

    Emphasis is placed on doing safer projects that mimic proven money-makers just to keep something—anything! —moving through the pipeline (see The Lion King 1 1⁄2, a direct-to-video effort that came out in 2004, six years after The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride).

    when it comes to feeding the Beast, success only creates more pressure to hurry up and succeed again. Which is why at too many companies, the schedule (that is, the need for product) drives the output, not the strength of the ideas at the front end.

    Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company

  • The Ugly Baby:

    Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in order to grow. What this means is that they have a hard time coexisting with the Beast.

    • Or, a great quote from Ratatouille’s Anton Ego: “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

Embracing change, uncertainty, and failure

Every entrepreneur has a story about being adaptable and struggling through failure, and Catmull is no exception. Amazingly, after Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm, the company spent its first 4 years trying to sell high-end computers in order to wait for computing technology to improve enough to make computer-animated films possible. The hardware selling ended up losing money, however, and Jobs nearly sold Pixar (after sinking $50M into Pixar)–but gave up after several attempts. Even after the initial success of Toy Story, Catmull cites another “near-death” experience when an employee deleted Toy Story 2 and the company only had a one-off backup thanks to another employee who had gone away on maternity leave. Over the years he learned that there is a lot of randomness and uncertainty in business and the best approach is to prepare for it rather than resist it.

  • Don’t vilify failure:

    Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attention to government- funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money. (Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that examined whether people in the military should carry umbrellas.) While such scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes.

  • The failure threshold:

    How many errors are too many? When does failure go from a stop on the road to excellence to a red flag that signals change is needed? … The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew.

  • Pete Docter’s advice:

    ‘Sometimes in meetings, I sense people seizing up, not wanting to even talk about changes,” he says. “So I try to trick them. I’ll say, ‘This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if …’ Or, ‘I’m not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute …’ If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas—so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around. Then if you hit upon some new idea that clearly works, people are excited about it and are happier to act on the change.’

  • “Play the ball where the monkey drops it”:

    I heard a delightful—and possibly apocryphal—story about what happened when the British introduced golf to India in the 1820s. Upon building the first golf course there, the Royal Calcutta, the British discovered a problem: Indigenous monkeys were intrigued by the little white balls and would swoop down out of the trees and onto the fairways, picking them up and carrying them off. This was a disruption, to say the least. In response, officials tried erecting fences to keep the monkeys out, but the monkeys climbed right over. They tried capturing and relocating the monkeys, but the monkeys kept coming back. They tried loud noises to scare them away. Nothing worked. In the end, they arrived at a solution: They added a new rule to the game—”Play the ball where the monkey drops it.

Techniques and Processes at Pixar

Catmull tells a story about going on a road trip with another couple who get into an argument over a blown tire and continue to drive rather than thinking clearly and pulling over. His point is that our past and our relationships distort our view of reality and that this effect magnifies exponentially in large companies. He devotes a chapter to the techniques used at Pixar to improve thinking and communication.

  • Dailies, or Solving Problems Together: Frequent daily feedback helps catch issues early and promotes team communication.

  • Research Trips: Fun examples like Ratatouille’s team going to Paris to research both Michelin-starred restaurants and the sewers. They may seem excessive, but Catmull argues that craftsmanship pays off:

    Very few moviegoers have actually been inside the kitchen of a high-end French restaurant, for example, so you might think the obsessive specificity of Ratatouille’s kitchen scenes—the chef’s clogs clacking ont he black-and-white tile floors, the way they hold their arms when they cut up vegetables, or how they organize their work spaces—would be lost on the audience. But what we’ve found is that when we are accurate, the audiences can tell. It just feels right.

  • The Power of Limits: Because of its reduced oversight and emphasis on quality, Pixar needed budget and time limits to prevent “the beautifully shaded penny” tendency. Catmull cites a particularly over-designed CD case:

    The moment is over in three seconds, and during it, only a few of the CD cases are at all visible. But for every one of those CDs, Pixar artists created not just a CD cover but a shader … an artist or technical director may think that the thing they are working on is essential and may pour his or her heart into it while having no sense of its actual value to the film.

  • Integrating Technology and Art (Tools): Tools play a large role at tech companies, and Pixar is no exception. They allow small teams (which generally work better) to do more. Catmull shares about the “Review Sketch tool”, “Pitch Docter”, and other innovations. The key is getting buy-in from users, and that is done by allowing direct communication between teams.
  • Short Experiments: Pixar is known for showing short films during the commercial window of each of their major films. Apparently these cost up to $2M and don’t yield profits at Pixar. The hope was “making shorts would encourage experimentation and, more important, become a proving ground for fledgling filmmakers [they] hoped would go on to direct features someday.” They also provided great cross-training and team-building for all those involved.
  • Learning to See: Catmull sees art training classes are a “head-fake” for teaching people how to see past their cognitive biases. People draw chairs better when they turn them upside down, or focus on the negative space (draw the “not-chair”).
  • Postmortems: They “Consolidate What’s Been Learned”, “Teach Others Who Weren’t There”, “Don’t Let Resentments Fester”, “Use the Schedule to Force Reflection”, and “Pay it Forward”.
  • Continuing to Learn: Pixar University courses expanded to all sorts of tangential topics like sculpting, meditation, dancing, etc., and yet provided immense value because they (1) lowered inhibitions and fostered camaraderie among diverse groups who wouldn’t interact otherwise, and (2) helped employees keep a “beginner’s mind” of trying new things, being playful, etc.

Closing Thoughts

My father worked in the cartoon industry and we lived in Los Angeles, so my family was in the front-row seat when Pixar’s Toy Story came out. I was 8 and I got a great kick out of it. My little brother, 2 at the time, liked it even more, so it played in our house year-round and wound up in his blankets, wardrobe, and of course toy boxes as well. We’ve been loyal Pixar watchers ever since. However, 25 years later, reading this book has given me a much greater appreciation for not only the incredible technological and creative innovation that went into the films I took for granted, but also the managerial finesse it took to sustain the company culture that produced these golden eggs. It was a joy to be able to read a book that both taught me something technically and also enriched my understanding of the times I grew up in.

  1. There are more than I’ve been able to keep up with but I’ll publish notes on them in the future. Participating in a reading club has been wonderful, by the way. The discussions with my colleagues have raised great insights and I look forward to each one. Also, I really like how getting book suggestions from like-minded peers is expanding my reading range. ↩

  2. Reed Hastings touts similar principles (though in a more direct and straightforward way) in No Rules Rules, which adds more evidence in their favor. ↩