This book is written by none other than Ed Catmull, the co-founder (along with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar animation studios—an academy award winning studio.
Creativity, Inc. is an insightful book about how creativity and business should merge together and become one.
This has been described as being one of the most well-written books about management and business, ever. It was a New York Times bestseller and was named to be one of the best books of 2014 by The Huffington Post, Financial Times, and lots more. For this reason, I decided that I absolutely had to include it in this list.
This particular book is for business people that want to lead their employees to some amazing, never before achieved height. It is a guide for anyone that aims to be unique, to be original and different.
When you read this, you get a peek into the world of meetings, postmortems, and sessions in which brainstorms which spark ideas for some of the most famous films in history were created.
This book will show you how you can learn about creative culture, and it also sums up the ideas that the author—Ed Catmull—believes make us able to do the best we possibly can. This is something that every businessperson or aspiring businessperson needs to be enlightened about.
Catmull reveals all of the secret techniques and ideas of Pixar that make it such a successful business, and so admirable. When he was young Ed Catmull dreamt that he would, one day, creates the first computer-animated film ever.
When he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, he allowed that dream to keep growing, and, in fact, nurtured it. Later on, he created a partnership with someone that eventually led to the founding of Pixar along with its co-founders.
Nine years later, he first computer animated movie was released. Catmull’s dream was now a reality, and the animation was changed forever.
The main reason that movie was so successful—as were the many movies that followed it—was because of the amazing, different environment that Catmull created at his workplace, based on a way of thinking that differs from the norm and allows creativity to flourish.
One of these ideas was “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or come up with something better”.
Over several decades, Catmull has come up with some groundbreaking ideas to allow your creativity to work to its full potential and break down every barrier that prevents it from doing so. This book contains all of those ideas, making it an absolutely amazing read that will change the way you think and allow you to marry your business to your creativity and get the best of both worlds.