Creativity Inc: Balancing Productivity and Creativity
Book Review: Animation, History, and Teamwork
Creativity Inc, is an engaging book about how to balance creativity and productivity when managing creative organizations. While the insights come from experiences at an animation studio, the lessons are applicable includes most any kind of knowledge work, including software development. A
long the way you’ll discover:
• A history of the early days of Computer Animation at Pixar.
• A memoir of the author’s journey from content creator to manager of an organization that creates amazing content.
• Insights into a key player in the story of Pixar, Steve Jobs.
As an agile software developer who has been in leadership roles, the main takeaway for me is that for significant projects, the team and it’s collaboration that’s far more important to success than the skill of any one person on the team. A key role of a leader of an organization is to facilitate that collaboration by creating environments that encourage giving and receiving candid feedback and respecting diversity of experience and perspective. Some of the essential elements of this are creating psychological safety, and taking power dynamics off the table, to help people focus on the work product and not the people when working to improve work. Yes, the people on your team need to have some skill, but to quote the book:
Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it, or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that you’ll get the ideas right.
And a great team is collaborative.
Getting good open collaboration is a hard problem, and as much as this is a book about lessons successfully learned, the author candidly shares stories of how things stopped working, or didn’t work at all, and what steps Pixar did to try to correct the situation. The book ends with a summary of some key quotable principles from the book about managing a creative organization. You’ll want read the stories as they are valuable, especially if you want to avoid some common pitfalls.
This expanded edition differs from the original in that some chapters has a Post Script that discusses lessons learned from feedback for the first version.
While not a small book, it’s a quick engaging, read. There are few sections seem to get into more backstory than might be necessary, but if you read it from the frame it being part memoire these sections aren’t that distracting.
Get the book for the lessons on building productive, healthy teams of creative people (which include any kind of knowledge work) and enjoy the anecdotes about the creation of some films you might have enjoyed as a bonus.