Book Byte #80 "Creativity, Inc." by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

📣 Curious Quotes from the Author

“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”

“Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.”

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

“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”

“Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way.”

“If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.”

“I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.”

“When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”

“Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”

“Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.”

“For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre—personally, I think the person who can’t change his or her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak.”

“The future is not a destination - it is a direction.”

“You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.”

📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:

Change, along with the uncertainty and instability that it brings, is both unavoidable and important in creative situations. A really creative company culture is one that focuses on forming a functional team, creating trust, and cultivating an inventive environment.

Do not make your plans too inflexible. If your strategy is set in stone, there will be no space for adjustment if things do not go as planned.

Change your work place. Personalizing your office might help you prevent being bored and disinterested at work.

🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry

A lot of of what makes us Creative Problem Solvers has to do with how we approach change. If you’re a manager managing risk, everything is about not changing. If you are trying to fix a problem no one else can solve, it relies upon you thinking of ideas that no one has though before, let alone following policy or processes of your predecessors.

The Tech Industry embodies change, so it goes to assume that their employees must also if these companies want to be successful, but how do you find a balance of innovation but also a dereliction towards conformity and the following of proven systems?

Isn’t that the question of the next Millenia? When you figure it out, let me know!

🤝Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:

What in your life have you had an idea or an epiphany that was immediately shot down by a superior? What was their motivation to shutting you down so quickly? Most likely it didn’t have anything to do with how good the idea was, just that they weren’t willing to risk something they were already trying.