Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and the author of Creativity, Inc., a book on running a creative organization and on the unseen forces that get in the way of good work. In the wiki he shows up as a source on management practice and on learning from outcomes.

Ideas attributed to him

• Post-mortems that resist gaming. In a 2007 Stanford talk, “Keep Your Crisis Small,” Catmull described putting the team on each film through a rigorous post-mortem, especially after a success, because “when something goes right you want to bask in it and not dive deeper.” Because teams learn to game any fixed process, Pixar changed the process each time. The latest version asked each team to name the five things they would do again and the five they would not. See What’s In a Post-Mortem? and Post-Mortems, which cite his “five things” as a building block alongside Bezos’ “five whys.”
• Culture as the subject of the book. Elizabeth Yin’s thread on the audiobook summarizes his path (a computer-science background, a computer graphics studio, Lucasfilm, then Pixar) and notes that much of the book concerns company culture rather than the history. It also records the Disney contract for Toy Story and the IPO that followed the film, which strengthened Pixar’s hand in later negotiations with Disney.

Where this appears

Essays and concepts

• What’s In a Post-Mortem?: quotes his Stanford talk
• Post-Mortems: cites his “five things” questions

Books to read

• Creativity, Inc.: his book, on the anti-library

Saved tweets

• Last Week I Listened to… (tweet): thread summarizing the book
• If You Read Only One Thing Today… (tweet): shares an excerpt from the book