Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and later of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, has thought about this question for his entire professional life. Creativity, Inc., published in 2014 and co-written with journalist Amy Wallace, is his account of what he’s learned: about why creative organizations fail, what makes them succeed, and what specific practices and principles enabled Pixar to produce an unprecedented run of commercially and critically successful animated films — Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3 — that would be remarkable for any studio, let alone one that was reinventing the underlying technology at the same time.
The Challenger comparison is Catmull’s own. He uses it to introduce the concept that becomes the book’s central problem: how do you ensure that the problems that exist in your organization — and they always exist — become visible and addressable before they become catastrophic? The O-ring failure that destroyed Challenger was known about. Engineers had flagged the risk. The information existed in the organization. What failed was the organization’s ability to surface that information to the people with the power to act on it. The creative failures that destroyed promising films at Pixar had the same structure: the problems were knowable, sometimes known, but the organizational mechanisms for bringing them to light were insufficient or absent.
The Braintrust
The central institutional innovation of Pixar’s creative process — the practice Catmull credits most directly with the quality of the films — is the Braintrust: a group of senior creative people who watch cuts of films in development and provide candid, unfiltered feedback to the director. Not politicized feedback, not diplomatic softening, not the hierarchical hedging that produces useless notes. Direct, honest, expert creative feedback about what’s working and what isn’t, why it isn’t, and what might make it better.
The critical structural feature that makes the Braintrust work is that it has no authority. The Braintrust cannot tell the director what to do. It offers its collective wisdom and critique; the director listens, considers, and decides what to do with it. The director remains in creative control. The Braintrust is advisory, not executive. This distinction turns out to be everything.
If the Braintrust had authority — if the director were required to implement its suggestions — several things would happen. Directors would become defensive, treating each Braintrust meeting as a threat to their creative vision rather than a resource for improving it. Braintrust members would hedge their feedback, knowing the director must live with whatever they say. The power dynamics would distort the communication in all the ways power dynamics distort communication in hierarchical organizations. The honesty that makes the Braintrust valuable would be the first casualty of giving it authority.
Without authority, the dynamic is entirely different. The director comes to the Braintrust wanting help. Braintrust members give their honest best thinking, knowing the director will filter and interpret it. The relationship is collaborative rather than hierarchical. The feedback is offered and received in the spirit of a shared commitment to making the film as good as it can be, rather than in the spirit of competition or control.
This seems obvious once stated, but it violates almost everything conventional management theory says about accountability and authority. Most organizations assume feedback without authority is useless — that getting something done requires the power to make it happen. The Braintrust demonstrates the opposite: candor without coercion is actually more effective, because it preserves the trust and creative ownership that make the director actually capable of making the right creative decisions.
The Ugly Baby
Early in the book, Catmull introduces an image that captures something essential about the creative process: the ugly baby. Every Pixar film, in its early stages, is an ugly baby. Not figuratively — the ideas are literally incoherent, the characters don’t work, the story has enormous structural problems, the visual approach is inconsistent and often unappealing. Evaluated against the standard of the finished product, an early Pixar film would be judged terrible and not worth pursuing.
The important organizational insight is that ugly babies require protection, not honesty. The honest assessment of an ugly baby is that it’s ugly. But the honest assessment, communicated in a way that shuts down the development process before the baby has had a chance to grow, kills films that would have been extraordinary. The skill is knowing when to provide honest feedback that improves the work and when to provide protection that allows the work to reach the stage where it can actually receive and use honest feedback.
This is one of the most detailed and genuinely difficult management challenges in creative organizations: timing candor appropriately. Too early, and candor is destructive. Too late, and candor is ineffective because too much is committed and change is too costly. The right moment requires judgment that no framework can substitute for — the judgment of people who have watched many creative projects evolve and know what the signs of genuine potential look like, even when they’re embedded in work that currently looks awful.
The implication is that the organizational skill is not just candor but wisdom about when and how to deploy candor. Cultures that are all candor at all times, without the sensitivity to protect early-stage work, produce the same creative failures as cultures that are all politeness and no candor. The Braintrust meetings happen at specific stages, not continuously, for this reason.
Fear of the Unknown vs. The Unknown
One of the intellectual themes that runs through the entire book is the difference between the unknown and the fear of the unknown — and the organizational imperative to be honest about which one is actually in play. Most organizational dysfunction, Catmull argues, is not caused by the unknown itself but by the fear of the unknown: the defensive maneuvers, the information suppression, the political behavior people engage in when afraid of what might be discovered if the organization looks clearly at what’s actually happening.
The unknown is always present in creative work. Nobody knows if the film will be good in advance. Nobody knows if the technology being developed will work. Nobody knows if the story being developed will find its audience. This uncertainty is not a problem to be solved; it’s the nature of creative work. The problem is when the fear of this uncertainty leads people to behave in ways that prevent the organization from learning what it needs to learn.
Catmull describes his ongoing effort to make Pixar an organization where the unknown is safe to acknowledge — where people can say “I don’t know” or “this isn’t working” without triggering punishment or defensiveness. This requires deliberate, sustained effort against the organizational gravity that tends toward the suppression of bad news. The natural tendency of any organization is to become better at presenting itself as functioning well than at actually functioning well. Resisting this tendency requires constant vigilance and specific structural interventions.
The Postmortem and the Dailies
The conditions: the postmortem must occur long enough after the end of the project that people are no longer in the emotional state of completion and can think clearly, but not so long that the memory has faded. It must create safety for honest assessment of failure — which means people can’t be punished for what they say in postmortems, and the people with power in the room must model honest self-assessment first. And it must produce specific, actionable learning rather than general observations that sound wise but don’t change anything.
The second practice is “dailies” — the daily screening of work in progress for the team working on a film. In the early days of Pixar, people were reluctant to show work until it was polished, because showing unfinished work felt exposing and vulnerable. Catmull insisted on daily showings of raw, in-progress work, and what happened was instructive: people got used to seeing imperfection, the stigma of unfinished work dissolved, and the feedback loop tightened dramatically. Instead of waiting for weeks to show work that might have fundamental problems, the team saw and addressed problems daily. The work improved faster because the feedback arrived more often.
The lesson is about normalizing imperfection in process. Work that must be polished before anyone sees it will be polished before anyone can usefully critique it — meaning the fundamental problems will be hidden under the polish until they’re much harder and more expensive to address.
Steve Jobs and the Relationship
A substantial portion of the book deals with Pixar’s relationship with Steve Jobs, who bought the company from George Lucas in 1986 and served as its primary backer and eventual CEO for over a decade. The relationship is complicated and Catmull handles it with both honesty and genuine affection. Jobs was difficult in specific ways — he had strong opinions about creative direction that he was not shy about expressing, he was demanding to the point of causing significant stress, and his interventions in Pixar’s business were not always helpful. But he was also a genuine supporter who ultimately trusted Catmull and John Lasseter (Pixar’s creative chief) to run the creative side of the company, who showed up when it mattered, and who demonstrated, over time, an unusual capacity to learn and evolve.
One of the more striking sections of the book deals with Jobs’s death. Catmull writes about it with real grief — Jobs was not just a business partner but a significant figure in his life — and he uses the occasion to reflect on the difficulty of seeing people clearly while they’re present. Narratives get constructed about the people closest to anyone, and those narratives, however loving, are necessarily incomplete. They filter out what doesn’t fit.
The person is always more complex than the narrative allows.
This observation extends beyond Jobs to become a more general management insight: the people anyone works with are never fully knowable, their potential is never fully predictable, and narratives about them — however carefully constructed — are obstacles as well as aids to seeing them clearly. The organizational implication is that the structures built for assessing and developing people should create regular opportunities to be surprised by them, to have narratives challenged by new information about their capabilities and contributions.
The Disney Acquisition and Cultural Preservation
In 2006, Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion, and Catmull became president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. The book’s account of this acquisition and its aftermath is one of its most practically instructive sections for anyone who has ever had to manage a cultural integration.
Catmull’s challenge was to revitalize Disney Animation — which had been struggling creatively and commercially for years — without destroying the Pixar culture that had produced its success. The naive approach would be to transplant the Pixar practices wholesale into Disney. This doesn’t work for the same reason transplanting any culture into a different organization doesn’t work: culture is not a set of practices that can be installed; it’s a web of relationships, habits, and shared understandings that develops over time in a specific context. The practices that worked at Pixar worked there because of what was already there — the specific people, the specific history, the specific ways of relating those people had developed. At Disney, the context was different, the people were different, and a direct transplant would produce cargo cult behavior: the forms of Pixar’s culture without the substance.
What Catmull did instead was to engage honestly with what was actually wrong at Disney Animation — why it had lost its way, what the specific organizational dysfunctions were — and address those directly while creating the conditions (psychological safety, direct feedback, the protection of creative ownership) he believed were the actual drivers of creative excellence. The specific practices were adapted rather than transplanted. The underlying principles were consistent.
The result — Bolt, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia — was a remarkable revival of a studio that had been producing largely undistinguished work. The principles traveled; the specific practices had to be reinvented for the new context.
What Catmull Gets Right About Management
What distinguishes Creativity, Inc. from most management books is Catmull’s evident comfort with uncertainty and complexity. He doesn’t claim to have solved the problem of creative management. He describes specific things that worked and specific things that didn’t, acknowledges the ongoing challenge of maintaining what was built against the organizational forces that tend to erode it, and is honest about the ways he personally contributed to problems as well as solutions.
His most important insight may be the simplest: problems are always hidden in plain sight. The things that will eventually damage or destroy an organization are present before they become crises — in the behaviors of specific people, in the communication patterns that have silently changed, in the cultural drift that no one explicitly notices because it happens slowly. The organizational skill is not brilliance at solving crises but sensitivity at detecting and addressing problems before they become crises.
This requires, above all, candor — the organizational culture in which people can say what they actually observe, in which bad news travels up as reliably as good news, in which the emperor’s lack of clothes is noted by people who don’t fear being wrong or being seen as disloyal. Building this culture is the hardest and most important work of leadership, more important than strategy, more important than talent, more important than technology or resources. An organization that can see clearly and speak honestly about what it sees will eventually find solutions to whatever problems it faces. An organization that cannot will eventually fail regardless of how smart or well-resourced its people are.
The Lessons That Transfer
The Braintrust model — advisors with no authority who give candid feedback — applies to almost any domain. The protection of ugly babies — giving early-stage work the time and safety to develop before exposing it to full critical scrutiny — applies to any creative process, from product development to research to strategy. The postmortem discipline — systematic reflection on what actually happened and why — applies to every project of any significance. The normalization of imperfection in process — showing incomplete work early and often — applies wherever the feedback loop needs to be tightened.
Most deeply: the commitment to seeing clearly, to building the organizational conditions that surface problems early and accurately, to prioritizing candor over comfort — these are not creative-industry-specific. They are the foundations of any organization that wants to learn, adapt, and improve continuously rather than gradually calcifying into the performance of competence without the substance of it.
Ed Catmull is one of the most thoughtful people ever to lead a major creative organization, and Creativity, Inc. is one of the most honest and genuinely useful accounts of what that leadership actually required. For anyone trying to build something that lasts, that produces excellent work, and that maintains its vitality over time, this book is a primary source document. The principles it describes are hard. They are also, as the Pixar filmography demonstrates, worth the difficulty.
The Technical Roots and the Creative Revolution
A dimension of the book that business readers sometimes underweight is the technical origin story — the actual scientific and engineering work that Catmull and his collaborators at Lucasfilm and then Pixar were doing in the late 1970s and 1980s to make computer animation even theoretically possible. This isn’t incidental background. The creative culture at Pixar was significantly shaped by the fact that it began as a technology research group rather than a film studio, and that the people who built the culture brought with them the epistemological habits of scientists: comfort with uncertainty, willingness to say “I don’t know,” the expectation that problems are soluble with sufficient ingenuity and persistence, and the deep respect for demonstrated competence over claimed authority.
Catmull was working on the problem of rendering three-dimensional computer images on a two-dimensional screen — a problem that required solving fundamental questions about how light interacts with surfaces, how to represent texture computationally, how to handle the enormous processing demands of rendering complex scenes. The solutions required genuine mathematical and computational innovation. The people capable of producing those solutions were highly educated, intellectually independent, and accustomed to having their ideas evaluated on technical merit rather than on position in a hierarchy.
When this group transitioned from technology to filmmaking, they brought these habits with them. The Braintrust — where creative ideas are evaluated on their quality rather than on who proposes them — is partly a legacy of the scientific culture’s norm of evaluating ideas on their merits. The psychological safety that allows junior animators to push back on senior directors is partly a legacy of the scientific culture’s expectation that anyone who can demonstrate a better solution has the right to propose it. Understanding this genealogy helps explain why the Pixar culture worked and why direct transplantation to organizations with different histories and cultures is difficult.
John Lasseter and Creative Partnership
The book’s treatment of John Lasseter — Pixar’s creative chief and the director of many of its most beloved films — is necessarily incomplete given that Lasseter was forced out of Pixar and Disney in 2017 following revelations of workplace misconduct. Catmull addresses this briefly in the epilogue of the updated edition, and his honesty about how the misconduct had been hidden from him — not deliberately concealed, but simply not visible within the culture he had built — is itself a significant reflection on the limits of radical candor cultures.
The Lasseter situation reveals something the main body of the book doesn’t fully account for: that cultures of psychological safety and candid feedback can still harbor serious dysfunction when the dysfunction involves people whose creative authority and institutional importance create blind spots in the feedback system. The people who might have reported Lasseter’s behavior calculated the risk correctly — reporting misconduct by the creative leader of a studio that defined itself by its creative culture would not have felt safe, regardless of the official policies about candor and honesty. The power dynamics Catmull worked so hard to neutralize in the intellectual domain were alive and well in the interpersonal domain.
This is not a refutation of Catmull’s principles. It’s an extension of them into territory he didn’t fully explore: that the commitment to seeing clearly has to extend to the full range of what’s happening in an organization, not just to the quality of creative work, and that the structures for making problems visible have to account for the specific power concentrations that create pockets of impunity even within generally healthy cultures.
The Invisible Problems
One of the most important and most often quoted passages in Creativity, Inc. is Catmull’s observation that the most dangerous problems in any organization are the ones that can’t be seen — not because they’ve been deliberately hidden but because the organization’s culture and structure have made them invisible to the people with the power to address them. These invisible problems are not exotic edge cases. They’re the normal condition of any organization above a certain size: the cultural drift nobody explicitly notices because it happens incrementally, the performance problem that’s been explained away so many times the explanation has become the truth, the interpersonal dynamic everyone knows about and nobody discusses because the cost of discussing it seems too high.
The method Catmull developed for surfacing invisible problems — formal listening sessions with small groups, regular surveys designed to elicit honest responses, the “Notes Day” where the entire studio stopped production to identify what was impeding their best work — all share a common feature: they create a structure for honest communication separate from the normal hierarchical channels, which are subject to all the filtering that hierarchy produces. Information doesn’t flow upward naturally in any organization. It has to be specifically sought, in contexts that make the seeking safe.
This principle extends to the individual level as well. A leader who wants to see clearly about their own organization cannot rely on the information that comes to them voluntarily, which is already filtered by everyone’s calculation of what’s safe to share. It has to be actively sought — the information people are calculating it’s not safe to share — by creating specifically the conditions that make sharing it safe, and responding to what’s learned in ways that make sharing safe next time too. This is ongoing, effortful, never-finished work. The organization that has done it once hasn’t done it permanently. The invisible problems are always regenerating, always requiring fresh effort to surface.
Protecting the New Idea and the Autonomy Balance
The tension between giving creative people sufficient autonomy to develop their best work and providing sufficient oversight to catch projects that are developing serious problems before they become catastrophically expensive to fix is one that Catmull returns to repeatedly and never fully resolves — because it genuinely cannot be fully resolved. It requires ongoing judgment, calibrated differently for different stages of development and different types of projects.
The Pixar practice was to give directors very wide latitude in the early development stages — to protect the ugly baby from premature critique — and to introduce the rigorous feedback of the Braintrust at specific defined stages when the project was developed enough for the feedback to be useful and when significant changes were still possible without prohibitive cost. This required Catmull and the organization to trust directors to develop their vision in directions that might seem wrong from the outside, and to trust that the Braintrust process would surface the real problems at the right time.
When this trust was violated — when directors developed projects that had fundamental problems the Braintrust feedback didn’t resolve, sometimes requiring the replacement of the director or the substantial reimagining of the project late in development — the cost was enormous. Several Pixar films went through catastrophic mid-development crises that required the creative equivalent of emergency surgery. The fact that the films that emerged from these crises — Toy Story 2 is the most dramatic example — often became among Pixar’s best work is a testament to both the resilience of the creative process and the danger of drawing too optimistic a conclusion from successful outcomes.
The lesson is not that creative autonomy is wrong or that oversight should be tighter. It’s that the combination of genuine autonomy and genuine feedback, held in tension by people who trust each other and are committed to the shared goal of making the work as good as it can be, is the only system that actually produces creative excellence at scale. Neither component works without the other. Neither can be substituted for, systematized away, or managed by a formula. It is, in the end, a human achievement, produced by human beings who have worked hard to build the conditions for it.
How to Hire and Retain Creative Talent
Catmull’s approach to hiring is distinctive and worth understanding in detail, because it inverts several common assumptions about what makes a great creative hire. The standard approach in most industries focuses on credentials, track record, and demonstrated expertise: hire the person who has done this before, who has the portfolio that proves capability, who can hit the ground running. This is sensible in stable domains where the definition of the job is stable. In creative work, where each project is genuinely different from the last, it produces a kind of competence inflation — everyone can do what’s already been done — without producing the generative novelty that great creative work requires.
Catmull looked for something harder to measure: the specific quality of a person’s thinking about their craft, combined with a level of intellectual honesty about what they don’t know. The best hires were often people who were extraordinarily perceptive about the problems in their own work — who could articulate precisely what wasn’t working and why — rather than people who were confident about how good their work was. The person who thinks their work is great and is eager to show it off often has a fixed sense of their own capabilities. The person troubled by specific weaknesses in their own work is often still growing.
Retention, in a creative environment, is primarily about ownership. Creative people need to feel that their work is genuinely theirs — that their creative judgment has real authority, that the decisions they make are treated as genuine decisions rather than as requests awaiting approval from above. The moment a creative person feels their role has been reduced to executing someone else’s vision, the psychological investment that produces their best work begins to dissolve. This doesn’t mean creative people can’t collaborate or can’t receive direction. It means the collaboration has to be genuine — the other person’s input is seriously considered, disagreements are resolved through argument rather than authority, and the final creative judgment belongs to the person whose name is on the work.
The Ego-Free Leader and Why It’s Rare
One of the implicit lessons of Creativity, Inc. is about what kind of leader can actually sustain a creative culture over time. The characteristics Catmull demonstrates throughout the book — genuine curiosity about what isn’t working, willingness to be publicly wrong, capacity to subordinate his own creative opinions to the judgment of people with more specific expertise, ongoing anxiety about whether the culture is being maintained — are not the characteristics most commonly celebrated in business leadership narratives. Most leadership narratives celebrate the decisive visionary, the person whose certainty inspired and whose bold decisions proved right. Catmull is something quieter and harder to narrativize: the person whose primary concern was whether the organization could see clearly, and who was perpetually worried that it couldn’t.
This perpetual worry is itself a kind of leadership intelligence. The leader who is confident that the culture is healthy is probably missing something. Culture, like physical health, doesn’t stay in a fixed state. It’s always either improving or deteriorating based on ongoing conditions, and the conditions that maintained it in one period may not maintain it in another. The organization that was psychologically safe last year may not be this year if significant personnel changes have occurred. The feedback culture that was working when the company was small may not be working at the current scale. Catmull’s perpetual concern was not neurosis; it was appropriate calibration to the genuine difficulty of what he was trying to maintain.
The leader who wants to build and sustain a creative culture needs to be comfortable with this perpetual uncertainty — comfortable not knowing whether success has been achieved, because the only honest answer is that full success never arrives, only the maintenance of the effort that produces the conditions for it. The culture is not a destination arrived at. It’s a practice maintained, and the maintenance requires ongoing investment of the same kind that built it: the honest feedback, the willingness to be challenged, the protection of early-stage work, the celebration of honest failure. These are never finished. Neither is the culture.
What Any Creative Leader Can Take From Pixar
The specific context of Pixar — a film studio making animated movies, funded by Steve Jobs, operating at the leading edge of computer graphics technology — is unusual enough that it can seem like a poor source of generalizable lessons. Catmull addresses this directly and convincingly. The principles that made Pixar work are not principles about animation or technology or storytelling. They’re principles about how creative people produce their best work, how organizations can be structured to support that work rather than undermine it, and how leaders can build cultures of genuine candor rather than political performance. These principles apply wherever genuinely creative work is being done by people whose creative judgment is the primary resource being deployed.
That domain is broader than most leaders realize. Product development, strategy, research, marketing, education, journalism, software engineering at the frontier — all of these are creative disciplines in which the quality of the work depends primarily on the quality of the creative judgment being exercised, and in which the organizational conditions that support or undermine creative judgment are the same ones Catmull describes. The specific practices may look different — most organizations probably don’t need a Braintrust for reviewing quarterly reports — but the underlying principles apply. Candor about what isn’t working. Protection for early-stage thinking. The separation of feedback from authority. The ongoing vigilance against the forces that make problems invisible. These are the foundations of any organization that wants to do genuinely creative work at a genuinely high level, for as long as it wants to keep doing it.
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