MBA1623 Must Read P1 – Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 all RMBA show business building insights every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zedholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over@100mba.net and today's episode is a must read episode. Actually it's part one of a two part must read episode. Yep, this must read is that epic. In our must read episodes I share with you a book that I've read that has greatly influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its insights, its takeaways and why you should read it too. This two part Must Read Part one today and part two tomorrow is Creativity Inc. By Ed Catmull. Ed Catmull is the co founder of Pixar, that famous animation studio that has created hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, Inside Out. I can go on and on. This book is one of those that I knew I had to read for some time. So glad I did. It's got over 2000 reviews on Amazon and I learned so much from this book that I had to share it in two parts. Two episodes of the podcast. In this two parter I'll be sharing with you some insights and takeaways that I learned from this book on creating a great team with great people, with great ideas, how to foster a great culture of honesty and candor, how to cultivate creativity in your business, leadership and management skills, and so much more. Pixar is a very unique company. It changed the game in animation and animated movies. It basically ate Disney's lunch when it was at its peak. And as they say, success leaves clues. Let's pick up those clues and add those elements to our own businesses. That's what we're going to discuss in this two parter. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Creativity Inc. Is really a book about creating an exceptional company. How to create an incredible business that you're proud of, that you actually look forward to working at and getting up in the morning and going to how to create something for your customers that wows them, that's magical and really what it takes to create a company like that. Now what I love about this book is that the ideas build upon each other. They start with some really simple ideas that are profound, but things get more and more impactful as the book goes on. So if you're just getting started in business, those first lessons are really going to be helpful. As you start getting some momentum, the next lessons are going to be even more important for you to pay attention to and implement. There's so much to get into. So let me start with the first idea that struck me in this book in the early chapters and that is people are the real value in your business. The team you have, the people that actually create whatever you offer. Your customers are your biggest asset. They're the ones who are really going to move your business forward. This is why it's really important to get really good people okay on your team, even if it means hiring less people or not. As often it's better to have a small team of three people that are A players than a bunch of C players and have a team of 10. Ed Camel, the co founder of Pixar, says if you have the right people in your company, it's going to do crazy, amazing creative market leading things in your business. He says if you give a good idea to a mediocre or team, they'll screw it up. They'll not really see that idea to its full potential, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they'll either fix it or scrap it and come up with something even better. And in fact, he says getting the right people with the right chemistry trumps any great idea, because they will produce magic on your team. They will produce incredible things. I'm going to stop here, and I want to say that you might think to yourself, well, maybe this doesn't apply to my business. It definitely applies to your business. A lot of people think, oh, this is the movie industry. This is different. No, Pixar is beyond the movie industry. Not only are they telling stories which have a great storyline, a great plot. Right. A great script, and they're dealing with real actors like Tom Hanks, who plays Woody on Toy Story, and all the celebrities that do the voices of all their characters. But they got to deal with animation. They got to deal with computer science. They're really a computer software company that generates incredible, incredible animation. And they gotta market this product and they gotta merchandise this product. You know, toys and lunchboxes and backpacks. There's so much they have to do to make sure their company and brand is successful. It's not a simple, straightforward, you know, Hollywood type of business. This is a technology company merging with a media company, which is incredibly hard. So if it works for them, it's gonna definitely work for you. The next idea that really struck me hard was how important it is to be honest and candid with your team. Telling your team the truth sometimes is hard, the reality of the situation. But if you want your company to compete and to have longevity and to come up with creative solutions to the problems that you have, you can't keep all that stuff to yourself. You have to share it and be honest. So if you're creating a new feature or a new software or a new something, everybody on the team needs to feel that they can be candid and say, that's good, but not great. We need to do that over. We need to fix that, we need to improve that. But if everybody just rah rahs each other, you really don't strive for greatness. You don't really wow your customers because you're just content with okay. And that should not be okay. That should be something that you want to avoid. You want to make sure your team is constantly trying to critique its work in the pursuit of creating an amazing product, amazing experience for your customers. And Ed uses the word candor specifically because he feels like candor is a little less emotional, it's a little less moral. Meaning that you don't have to abide by some sort of moral code and feel a little guilty about being candor or candid, I should say. And he says candor is not cruel. It's just saying what you think in terms of a matter of fact. A matter of fact, you know, this is what the reality of the situation is. The other thing is that honesty and candor makes sure that the whole team understands that you are not the idea. So if you came up with an idea, if you're a team member and you came up with an idea and it gets critiqued, we're not critiquing you, we're not criticizing you. Because everybody's up for critique. Because we're trying to improve things, and this makes it easier for everybody not to be offended if everybody's on the same page. We have to be honest and we need to be candid so that way we can keep improving. Another incredible insight I got from this book is when you have issues in your business, you need to focus on the problem and not the person. If you have a problem in your business, fix the problem, fix the system, not the person who's responsible. A lot of people want to play the blame game in their business. Who made this mistake? How did this happen? Let's hold somebody responsible. Accountability, that really doesn't work if you're trying to allow people to be creative and to be able to make their own decisions. And at the end of the day, does it really matter who made that mistake? Does it really, really think about it for a moment? If it's an honest mistake, if it wasn't malicious, what really matters is fixing the problem, making sure it doesn't happen again. I'm gonna give you a story from the book that blew me away. They were three years into creating Toy Story 2, right? They were creating this movie, animation, storylines, everything. Something happened where somebody put in the code to delete everything. So the whole movie, all the work of three years, got deleted off the servers. Somebody happened to do this, okay? It was like, oh, man, this is horrible. Everything got deleted. Let's go and check the backups and restore from backup. When they went to do that, they discovered their backup system wasn't working. And it never worked, but they never actually looked into it because they never had to. So everything I got deleted. Three years of work and the backup system failed them. So they have no backup now. They're really worried because at this point in this creation process of the movie, they can't afford to make up three years. They're going to go out of business. Luckily, somebody in the team who recently was working from home in the last six months because she had a baby, was doing weekly backups to her own computer just so she can have an updated version of the movie so she can work on it at home. And she said, hey, I have backups, weekly backups from my computer at home. And they rush to her house, they pick up the computer, they realize, okay, she has a copy of everything. They're okay. I think the worst case scenario was that they're a week behind rather than three years behind. And Pixar saved. Now, what did they focus on? The interesting thing is, is that after they restored it, they didn't sit down and say, okay, who in the world deleted everything and who's responsible for the backups? And who put this, that, and the other thing and start chastising people. They just said, hey, we have a problem here. It's too easy for to delete things that we worked on so hard for three years. So we got to make it harder for people to enter that delete code because it can happen by mistake. Number two, our backup system is not working. We got to make sure our backup system is working and there's a backup system for the backup system so this doesn't happen again. So they basically fixed the problem instead of saying, no more responsibility to anybody, let's pull everybody rights. Because they realized, hey, we give so many people so much freedom. And that freedom may have cost us this blunder of the deletion, but the freedom also saved us because that freedom allowed somebody to feel like, I can make a backup of the whole thing at home while I'm working because I feel I have the right to do so, and I have ownership over this project. So they just focused on fixing the problem and preventing it from happening again. And they never found out who did this. And because they really didn't care. I know this sounds absolutely insane to some people, but there's a lesson here. Does it really matter? Really? You need to solve the bigger problems in your business as a leader. And of course, they knew it wasn't malicious, whatever happened, but they didn't focus on that. They focused on making their company better. Another huge takeaway from this book is the creative process. I mean, the book is called Creativity, Inc. Because, hey, it's Pixar. But they talk about, how can one be creative? How can you cultivate creativity on your team? A lot of people think creative or amazing work is just something that you discover. Wow, I got a great idea. And that's the idea that becomes the reality. No, he says, that's not how it works. The first draft of all of Pixar movies are horrible. They're not good and they never make the cut. Toy Story took five years. Five years. Think about that. Took them five years to create this movie before they even saw the reaction of a live audience. And in those five years, they redid the movie hundreds of times, literally. They've changed the movies, changed the stories. Small little edits here, small little edits there. Change the characters, change the motives of the characters. And he says creativity is done in a process of reiteration. It's like polishing a pebble over and over and over and over. And it's a form of refinement rather than discovery. You're refining an idea that may have been horrible at the start, but then becomes a fully fledged, fully expressed idea that is so, so succinct and resonates with people. It doesn't start that way. And this gave me this sense of, like, you know, relief. And I exhaled out loud when I was listening to the book in the gym. And the reason was not because I was powerlifting, but because it made me feel like, okay, you don't have to have. The answer immediately is something that you can work on as a team and improve. And improve. And I saw examples of that when I looked back at my own achievements in business and products and services and realized, yeah, that's really how a great idea is cultivated. It's not something that happens overnight. It's not one thing that just like, I got an idea, eureka, let's create it. No, that idea gets refined and gets improved and gets better and gets modified and adjusted as you work on it. And when I heard the five year thing about Toy Story, I was like, wow, five years. That's patience. That's patience. Realizing that it takes five years and understanding that to create a great piece of work, it takes time. And when they're getting started, they don't have a big team, you know, as they grew, they started to have multiple teams that can work on more than one movie at a time, which is incredible. But in the beginning, they worked on one movie. Took them five years, and then they did it and they moved on to the next movie.

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Guys, to wrap up today's part one of our two part must read episode on Creativity Inc. I want to leave you with one more small insight. And don't worry, we are going to continue with some great, great takeaways from this book tomorrow in Part two. And Ed says in the book that creativity is not novel, it's not original. He in fact says artists cut up and reassemble things that have come before. It gives the illusion of creativity. But there's no real new ideas. It's just a different perspective, a different look on an idea. It may seem new to some people. It may seem like, wow, that's something I've never seen before. But that's the magic of a creator. For example, Pixar movies, there were great movies with great storylines before. There have been animated movies before. There's been movies that tug on your heartstrings and movies with great soundtracks. This is nothing new, but they've cut up all these great aspects of movies in different types of movies and then put it into their movies and then added their special ingredient, which is computer generated animation. They said, we don't want to be another animated movie. We want to be the height of technology, but also the height of storytelling. When you have a moment Today, go to rottentomatoes.com and look up any of your favorite Toy Story movies. You will see they all are blockbuster hits. They are all highly rated by critics. And that's because they did that. They cut up and said, hey, I like this, I like this, I like this from all these different types of media and we're going to make it our own by making it our own dish. I love this insight because it relieves you of this idea that you have to come up with something totally new. No, you can take from other people's kind of concepts. Of course, we're not stealing anybody's ip, but we're saying, hey, I like that about that. I like that about this. How about I bring those together and try to create something of my own to give the best of many worlds in one? That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 LMBA Show. Don't forget to hit subscribe. By hitting subscribe, you get access to our archive lesson so you can go back and listen to some really amazing lessons in our archives. You also get our next episode automatically right on your device. So hit subscribe. It's absolutely free and you could do this on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, any platform. We're on the Mall, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Himalaya, Apple Podcasts were on them all. So hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you read a great book like I've read Creativity Inc. Share it with other people. Share its insights. Make it a topic of a discussion at dinner time, even with just your family or friends or on your next day or whatever it is, teaching other people reminds you of the things you've learned. It reinforces those concepts and they're great conversation starters and you learn a lot about other people when you discuss topics that are fresh and new. So don't forget to come back for part two of this two part series of our must read episode on Creativity Inc. Fantastic book. There's so much more to cover on planning, on fear, on failure, on trust, on understanding when rules go too far in a company, and so much more. Can't wait to catch you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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