Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff.

when a problem is festering and everyone seems to be looking the other way or when people are sitting around waiting to be told what to do, the crew gets antsy. It’s not that they don’t like the director—they usually do. It’s that they lose confidence in the director’s ability to bring the movie home. Which is part of why, to me, they are the most

About three hundred people work on each Pixar movie, and they are used to endless adjustments and changes being made while the story is finding its feet.

failure is something to be ashamed of. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure.

There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.

Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

John talks about “the nobility of entertaining people.”

A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of wha