In 1972, in a basement lab at the University of Utah, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student named Ed Catmull dipped his left hand into a bucket of plaster of Paris, waited for it to set, and then spent weeks painstakingly marking 350 polygons across the surface of the cast — tiny triangles and quadrilaterals, each vertex numbered, each coordinate measured and punched into a computer by hand. The machine he fed these numbers into had no screen worth mentioning. The output was a four-minute film: a ghostly, wireframe hand that slowly rotated, opened, closed its fingers, and then — through a visual trick that remains startling half a century later — pointed directly at the viewer. It was among the first examples of three-dimensional computer animation ever produced, and it looked like nothing anyone had seen before. It also looked, to almost everyone who saw it, like a curiosity — a technical novelty with no obvious commercial application, a parlor trick executed on hardware that cost more than a house.
Catmull did not see a novelty. He saw the first frame of a movie that did not yet exist, a movie he believed would take decades to make, a movie that would be generated entirely by computer. He had held this conviction since childhood, when he'd watched Peter Pan and Pinocchio on television in Salt Lake City and decided he wanted to become a Disney animator — only to discover, somewhere around high school, that he couldn't draw well enough. The dream didn't die. It migrated. It went underground into physics, then into computer science, then into the esoteric frontier of computational geometry, where Catmull's particular genius — patience married to obsession, technical depth married to artistic longing — could operate without anyone noticing what he was really doing.
What he was really doing was building, polygon by polygon, the infrastructure for a revolution. And he would keep doing it for twenty-three more years before the first frame of Toy Story flickered onto a screen.
By the Numbers
The Catmull Record
Part IIThe Playbook
Ed Catmull built one of the most consistently successful creative organizations in modern history — not through creative genius in the traditional sense, but through the systematic design of environments where creative genius could operate. His playbook is less a set of management techniques than a philosophy of organizational epistemology: how to build a company that can see itself clearly, tolerate ambiguity, and sustain excellence over decades. The following principles are drawn from Catmull's own words, his decisions, and the organizational structures he built at Pixar and Disney Animation.
Table of Contents
1.People over ideas — always.
2.Remove power from the feedback mechanism.
3.Assume your biggest problems are invisible.
4.Make it safe to tell the truth — then verify that it's actually safe.
5.Accept that everything starts as a mess.
6.Protect the new from the system that favors the old.
Never repeat your method — even when it works.
In Their Own Words
Failure isn't a necessary evil. In fact, it isn't evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
— Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
— Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
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.
— Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
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.
— Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.
Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.
Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.
A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms.
When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.
To understand Ed Catmull you have to understand the University of Utah's computer science department in the late 1960s, which is to say you have to understand what happens when a government with functionally unlimited research dollars tells a handful of brilliant people to go figure out the future with no particular deadline. The Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA, the same body that funded the precursor to the internet — was bankrolling the department under David Evans, a computer scientist who had been recruited in 1965 with a mandate so broad it amounted to: do interesting things with machines. Evans brought in Ivan Sutherland, whose 1963 doctoral thesis on Sketchpad had essentially invented interactive computer graphics. Sutherland, in turn, attracted a cohort of graduate students who would go on to reshape the digital world — Jim Clark, who would found Silicon Graphics and Netscape; Alan Kay, who would pioneer the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC; John Warnock, who would co-found Adobe.
What made the department unusual was not merely the quality of the minds assembled there but the deliberate structuring of their environment. Evans and Sutherland were running a company on the side — Evans & Sutherland, one of the earliest computer graphics firms — and had little time for hand-holding. The students were, in Catmull's recollection, "pretty much independent." They were expected to produce original work. They were at the frontier, and their job was to expand it. "They basically said, 'You can consult with us every once in a while, and we'll check in with you, but we're off running this company,'" Catmull later told Pat Hanrahan in an interview for ACM Queue. "I thought that worked great! It set up this environment of supportive, collegial work with each other."
This was, in retrospect, the first laboratory of the management philosophy that would define Catmull's life: create a community of exceptional people, give them a problem at the edge of the known, remove hierarchical interference, and trust that the social dynamics of talented peers working in close proximity will produce results that no top-down directive could anticipate. He was twenty years from Pixar. He was already practicing.
Catmull had arrived at Utah with two bachelor's degrees — physics and computer science — earned in four years, having originally enrolled as a physics major before realizing that a bachelor's in physics left you "still a beginner in that field." Computer science, by contrast, was wide open. "Here was an area just open with possibilities," he recalled. His first course was the department's brand-new offering in computer graphics. "We're in computer science, at the frontier, and I got to make pictures with the potential for making art," he told the University of Utah's Continuum magazine. "That was it. Now my direction was set."
His doctoral thesis, completed in 1974, was a remarkable document — not for its elegance (it was, by his own admission, a grab bag) but for its range. Buried within it were z-buffering, which calculates depth coordinates to determine which surfaces are visible in a 3D scene; texture mapping, the technique that wraps flat images onto curved surfaces; and methods for rendering bicubic patches, the mathematical descriptions of smooth curves. Each of these was, independently, a foundational contribution to computer graphics. Together, in a single thesis, they constituted something like a one-man construction of the field's load-bearing walls. Pat Hanrahan, who would later share the Turing Award with Catmull, marveled at the breadth: "You published papers on every area of computer graphics during that era... not the way typical grad students today approach research, where they'll home in on one particular subtopic and drill down to bedrock on it." Catmull's response: "I guess I didn't know any better."
The Decade of Being Irrelevant
He graduated into a void. No university wanted to hire a computer graphics specialist in 1974 — the field barely existed as an academic discipline, and to the extent it was understood at all, it was understood as a subcategory of frivolity. "At that time, computers were about number crunching, sorting, databases, and all sorts of cool topics," Hanrahan recalled. "Graphics were viewed as too playful for such a utilitarian machine." Catmull applied for academic positions and received no offers. He took a brief job at a small company in Massachusetts working on computer-aided design. Within months, Alexander Schure — a wealthy, eccentric benefactor who ran the New York Institute of Technology — recruited him to start a computer graphics laboratory.
NYIT was chaotic, experimental, and chronically underfunded in the ways that mattered. But Catmull built his first real team there, attracting researchers who would become central figures in the field, including Alvy Ray Smith, a brilliant and flamboyant computer scientist from Texas who had bounced through Xerox PARC and Stanford before washing up at NYIT. Smith — big personality, wild hair, a man who moved through the world at a very different frequency than the reserved, methodical Catmull — became his closest collaborator and, eventually, co-founder of Pixar. The partnership between them was, in its early years, a study in productive complementarity: Catmull the systems architect, Smith the visionary provocateur.
Meanwhile, Hollywood remained deaf. Catmull spent years trying to convince studio executives that computer graphics would transform filmmaking. "We were so irrelevant that we couldn't even get in the door to explain anything whatsoever," he later told the ACM. The word irrelevant is worth pausing on. Not wrong. Not ahead of our time. Irrelevant. So marginal to the concerns of people who made movies that the conversation couldn't begin.
George Walton Lucas Jr. had, by 1979, earned the right to be visionary with other people's money. Star Wars, released two years earlier, had grossed $460 million worldwide and made Lucas the most bankable filmmaker alive. But Lucas was not interested in resting. He was interested in tools. Specifically, he wanted to bring high technology into the film industry — a digital nonlinear editing system, a digital sound editing system, a laser film printer, and whatever else the frontier of computer graphics might yield. He hired Catmull to run a new Computer Division at Lucasfilm, based at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California.
Lucas's genius, from Catmull's perspective, was not creative direction but protective architecture. "Lucasfilm gave me the protection I needed to develop the techniques that would be required for future computer-generated imaging," Catmull later said. Lucas didn't micromanage the Computer Division. He funded it, shielded it from the commercial pressures of the main studio, and occasionally wandered over to see what was happening. The mandate was broad: push the boundaries.
Catmull hired Alvy Ray Smith as Director of Computer Graphics Research. In 1982-83, the team completed the "Genesis Effect" sequence for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan — a scene depicting a barren planet being rapidly terraformed by lush vegetation, the first completely computer-animated sequence in a feature film. It was sixty seconds long and took months to produce. But it proved something: computers could generate imagery compelling enough to appear in a major motion picture without audiences laughing.
Then came John Lasseter.
Lasseter was an animator — a genuine, hand-drawing, Disney-trained animator — who had been fired from Disney in 1983 after pitching too aggressively for the studio to adopt computer animation. He came to Lucasfilm initially as a freelancer in 1983, was hired full-time the next year, and was given the job title "Interface Designer" because Lucasfilm had no slot for an animator. But Catmull knew exactly what he had. Lasseter was the bridge between the artists and the engineers, the person who could feel what a character needed to do and then translate that feeling into the language of the people building the tools. He was also, unlike almost everyone else in the Computer Division, funny. He made things that were fun to watch.
In 1984, Lasseter directed The Adventures of André & Wally B., a short film that premiered at SIGGRAPH and demonstrated, for the first time, that computer-animated characters could have personality — could squash, stretch, and emote in ways that recalled the great Disney tradition. The following year, the team produced the Stained Glass Knight sequence for Young Sherlock Holmes. Each project was a proof of concept, a single brick laid in a wall that Catmull had been building since 1972.
But Lucasfilm was hemorrhaging money due to Lucas's divorce, and the Computer Division — which generated revenue from neither Star Wars merchandise nor theatrical releases — was an obvious target. Lucas decided to sell it.
The Man Who Overpaid
Steve Jobs in 1986 was a man between acts. Fired from Apple the previous year, he was running NeXT, a computer company that would spend years producing beautiful machines almost nobody bought. He was thirty years old, phenomenally wealthy, and looking for leverage — something that would prove, to himself and the world, that his ouster from Apple had been the mistake, not his behavior.
Jobs bought Lucasfilm's Computer Division on February 3, 1986, for $5 million, plus $5 million in capital investment. The new company employed about forty people. Jobs named it Pixar, after the Pixar Image Computer, a high-end graphics machine the team had developed at Lucasfilm. Catmull was president. Smith was vice president. Lasseter was the lone animator in what was, on paper, a hardware company.
What followed was a decade of near-continuous financial crisis. The Pixar Image Computer, designed for government and medical imaging applications, sold poorly. Jobs, who had never manufactured or marketed a high-end machine before, had "neither the experience nor the intuition about how to do so," as Catmull later wrote. The company had no sales force, no marketing department, no clear path to profitability. Jobs tried to sell Pixar more than once. At various points, Microsoft, Hallmark, and several other suitors were approached or expressed interest. None of the deals materialized.
From the outside, Pixar probably looked like your typical Silicon Valley startup. On the inside, however, we were anything but. Steve Jobs had never manufactured or marketed a high-end machine before, so he had neither the experience nor the intuition about how to do so. We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, me — none of us knew the first thing about how to run the kind of business we had just started. We were drowning.
— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.
Jobs poured in additional money — ultimately around $50 million before Pixar turned profitable — but the relationship between Jobs and Catmull was, in these years, more complicated than either man's public mythology suggests. Jobs could be brutal, dismissive, focused on the wrong problems. But he also provided something Catmull desperately needed: a patron who, whatever his other failings, would not let the company die before it achieved its goal. The dream — Catmull's dream, the one that had begun with a plaster hand — required an irrationally committed financier, and Jobs, for reasons that probably had as much to do with ego as vision, was that financier.
What kept the lights on, barely, was commercial animation work. Starting in 1989, Pixar produced television advertisements — the first was for Tropicana orange juice — and in 1986, Lasseter completed Luxo Jr., a two-minute short about a desk lamp and its child that premiered at SIGGRAPH and was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award. In 1988, Tin Toy, another Lasseter short, became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar. These shorts served a dual purpose: they generated modest revenue and they demonstrated, in increasingly sophisticated ways, that computer animation could carry emotional weight. A lamp could make you feel something. A tin drummer could make you feel sorry for it.
But the shorts were not the goal. The goal was a feature film.
The Deal That Made the Dream
In 1991, Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg — then head of the studio's film division, a man of legendary aggression and legendary taste — approached Pixar about producing three computer-animated feature films for Disney to distribute and own. The deal was, by any reasonable measure, terrible for Pixar. Disney would own the films, the characters, and the sequel rights. Pixar would receive a percentage of box office revenue but would bear the production risk on a medium that had never been proven at feature length. Catmull and his team accepted anyway. They had no leverage. They had a dream and a patron who was running out of patience, and Katzenberg was the only person in Hollywood willing to bet on a computer-animated feature.
The first film under the deal was Toy Story. Its development was agonizing. Disney's notes pushed the story toward edgier, more cynical territory — at one point, Woody, the cowboy protagonist, was a sarcastic jerk — and a disastrous screening in late 1993 nearly killed the project. Pixar's team shut down production, rewrote the script in two weeks without Disney's involvement, and produced a revised version that persuaded Katzenberg to let them continue. The film was released on November 22, 1995, and grossed $373 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of that year.
One week before Toy Story's opening — on November 29, 1995 — Jobs took Pixar public. The IPO was spectacularly successful, raising $132 million and valuing the company at roughly $1.5 billion. Jobs, who owned 80% of Pixar, was suddenly worth more than he'd been at Apple. The timing was not accidental; Jobs understood, with the showman's instinct that defined his career, that the window of maximum excitement was the week after a hit movie opened, when audiences were still talking and critics were still raving.
For Catmull, the achievement of a twenty-three-year dream produced an unexpected reaction: emptiness.
The Hollow Victory
"For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie," Catmull later wrote in Creativity, Inc.. "Now that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling." He was fifty years old. He was president of a public company. The thing he had chased since the plaster hand had been accomplished — and the accomplishment, rather than providing clarity, revealed a void. What now? Running a company was "more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn't special."
What gave him a new sense of mission was a crisis. In the aftermath of Toy Story's success, Catmull discovered that a large group of Pixar employees — the production managers, coordinators, and support staff who had not been part of the original creative team — were reluctant to sign on for a second project. They felt like second-class citizens. The artists and programmers who had defined Pixar's identity had received the lion's share of credit and status; the production side, which managed the grinding logistics of actually finishing a film, felt unseen and undervalued. Communication had broken down. Resentment had calcified.
This was the kind of problem that most leaders would have treated as a human resources issue — a morale problem to be fixed with better perks or clearer org charts. Catmull saw something larger. He saw the central challenge that would occupy him for the next twenty-three years: How do you prevent a successful organization from destroying itself?
He had watched it happen before — at Evans & Sutherland, which had pioneered computer graphics hardware and then made decisions that ceded the lead to Silicon Graphics; at Silicon Graphics itself, which had leapfrogged E&S and then collapsed under its own hubris. "I watched as many startups burned bright with success and then flamed out," Catmull wrote. "Gradually, a pattern emerged. Someone had a creative idea, obtained funding, brought on a lot of smart people, and developed and sold a product that got a boatload of attention... But then those companies did something stupid. Not just stupid in retrospect, but obvious at the time stupid."
The question that haunted him: If Pixar is ever successful, will we do something stupid too? And the corollary: The things that are happening now that are wrong at Pixar are already happening and I can't see them.
This was the pivotal insight — not a management technique but an epistemological commitment. The most dangerous problems in any organization are the ones the leader cannot see. Not because the leader is stupid, but because success distorts perception, because hierarchy suppresses candor, because the human desire to avoid conflict means that bad news travels slowly upward while good news races. The leader's job, therefore, is not to have the right answers but to build systems that surface the truth despite every organizational incentive to hide it.
The Braintrust
The mechanism Catmull developed to solve this problem — or rather, the mechanism that emerged from Pixar's practice and that Catmull codified into a philosophy — was the Braintrust. It began accidentally. During the production of Toy Story, John Lasseter noticed he was consistently relying on a small group of colleagues for guidance: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. These five — each would go on to direct major Pixar films — had intense, candid discussions about the story. The conversations were focused, funny, and productive. They were also, crucially, devoid of power dynamics.
"He found himself surrounded by this group that was funny, focused and really driven and passionate about the film itself," Catmull observed. "They would have these intense discussions, but it never got personal."
The Braintrust became Pixar's "primary delivery mechanism for straight talk," as Catmull described it. The premise was deceptively simple: put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems in a film-in-progress, and encourage them to be candid with each other. But the rules that made it work were precise and non-obvious:
Rule one: Nobody can override the director. "Basically we remove the power structure from the room," Catmull explained. "If they know that John or I can override the director, then they will enter the room in a defensive posture knowing the group could undermine them." The Braintrust gives notes. The director decides what to do with them.
Rule two: Peer to peer. "It's filmmaker talking to filmmaker. It's not boss talking to filmmaker or boss talking to employee."
Rule three: All team members share in one another's success.
Rule four: Honest notes. Not polite suggestions. Not hedge-your-bets qualifications. Direct, specific, constructive critique of what is not working and why.
When these conditions held, something happened that Catmull described as "the loss of ego in the room." Defenses dropped. People stopped protecting their ideas and started protecting the film. "It's an amazing event when it happens," he said. And when it didn't happen — when someone entered the room with an agenda, when the power dynamics leaked in, when people held back out of politeness or fear — the session was useless.
The Braintrust was not a committee. It had no authority. It could not greenlight or kill a project. It was, in organizational terms, an advisory body with no formal power — and that powerlessness was exactly what made it powerful. Because no one in the room could impose their will, everyone in the room could speak freely. Catmull had stumbled onto a profound organizational truth: the removal of authority from a feedback mechanism does not weaken the feedback. It strengthens it.
The fundamental tension is that people want clear leadership, but what we're doing is inherently messy. We know, intellectually, that if we want to do something new, there will be some unpredictable problems. But if it gets too messy, it actually does fall apart. And adhering to the pure, original plan falls apart, too, because it doesn't represent reality. So you are always in this balance between clear leadership and chaos; in fact that's where you're supposed to be.
— Ed Catmull, McKinsey interview
Every Movie Sucks
Here is a fact about Pixar that Catmull repeated so often it became a kind of mantra, a diagnostic tool for organizational health: every Pixar movie, in its early stages, is terrible. Not mediocre. Not rough around the edges. Terrible. "Initially, the films we put together, they're a mess," he told audiences. "It always sucks — and I don't mean that in a self-effacing way. I mean, it always sucks."
This was not a confession of weakness. It was a declaration of method. The Pixar process assumed that the first version of any creative work would be broken, and it built the entire production system around the act of iterative repair. The Braintrust existed to identify what was broken. Dailies — the practice of showing unfinished work to colleagues every day — existed to normalize imperfection. Postmortems, conducted after every completed film, existed to extract lessons from both success and failure.
The critical discipline was the willingness to restart. Toy Story 2, Ratatouille, The Good Dinosaur — all underwent what Catmull called "complete restarts," in which the story was thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up, at enormous cost. "We'd rather face the failure internally rather than release it that way," he said. When Disney CEO Bob Iger was told that The Good Dinosaur needed a year-long delay for retooling, the response was trust, not panic. "They completely trust that we're doing the right thing for the film and for the studio," Catmull said. "Now, you can't do that over and over again." He laughed.
The willingness to restart — and the organizational capacity to absorb the cost, the schedule disruption, the emotional toll — was, in Catmull's view, the most important signal a creative leader could send. It told the entire organization: we will not let something bad out. And that signal, paradoxically, made people more willing to take risks. If you know the safety net is strong, you'll attempt more difficult acrobatics.
But the willingness to restart also required something harder than courage. It required the ability to diagnose when a project was in trouble — which in turn required an information environment where bad news could travel upward without being filtered, softened, or buried. "If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings," Catmull wrote, "you have a problem."
The Disney Rescue
On January 24, 2006, Disney announced it would acquire Pixar for $7.4 billion in an all-stock transaction. The deal turned Steve Jobs — who still owned a majority stake in Pixar — into Disney's largest individual shareholder, with approximately 7% of the company. CEO Bob Iger named Catmull president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and John Lasseter chief creative officer of both.
The acquisition was, on its surface, a story about Disney buying a hit factory. But the more interesting story was what happened afterward: Catmull and Lasseter were asked to fix Disney Animation itself, a studio that had defined American animated filmmaking for seventy years and had been in creative decline for nearly a decade.
Catmull's approach was characteristically structural rather than dramatic. He did not fire the existing Disney animation team, did not impose Pixar's culture by decree, did not merge the two studios. Instead, he kept them separate — physically, organizationally, culturally. The reasons were precise: First, by solving their own problems, Disney's team could say "Nobody bailed us out, we did it," which mattered enormously for morale and identity. Second, maintaining distinct cultures preserved diversity — both technical and artistic. Third, the temptation to borrow resources from the other studio during a crisis would undermine the discipline of self-reliance.
When Ratatouille got into trouble at Pixar at roughly the same time Bolt was struggling at Disney, Catmull refused to let either studio help the other. "We drew a hard line," he told Animation Magazine. The constraint was painful. It was also essential. If Disney's team knew that Pixar would bail them out, they would never develop the internal resilience and creative confidence they needed.
The turnaround worked. Disney Animation released Tangled in 2010, Wreck-It Ralph in 2012, and Frozen in 2013 — the last of which became the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Under Catmull and Lasseter's stewardship, Disney Animation went from creative irrelevance to producing $1 billion movies. The rescue was quiet, systemic, and grounded in principles Catmull had been refining for three decades.
At the beginning of his tenure at Disney, Catmull made a small but telling change. In meetings, if there were three people in the room with more power than the others, for the first fifteen minutes, they had to remain silent. If they spoke first, they would set the tone, and Catmull didn't want that. The signal was clear: we support you and want to create a safe environment where we can all benefit from a sense of inclusion.
The Man Who Wasn't Steve
There is a temptation, in telling the Pixar story, to make it a Steve Jobs story. Jobs was the founder, the financier, the public face, the man whose name appeared in every headline. Catmull's role — the quiet, patient, systems-oriented leader who actually ran the company — resists narrative. Jobs was drama. Catmull was infrastructure.
But the relationship between them was more interesting than that dichotomy suggests. Jobs changed significantly during his years at Pixar — a transformation that Catmull had a front-row seat to, and that he believed was inadequately understood by the public. The Steve Jobs of 1986, who bought Pixar, was the same combative, domineering figure who had been ousted from Apple. The Steve Jobs of 2006, who sold Pixar to Disney and returned to Apple to build the iPhone, was a different person — more patient, more willing to listen, more attuned to the dynamics of creative teams.
Catmull attributed some of this change to the simple experience of being wrong. At Pixar, Jobs was not the domain expert. He didn't understand animation, didn't understand filmmaking, and — critically — knew he didn't understand them. This was unusual for Jobs, who in most contexts operated from a position of supreme confidence in his own taste and judgment. At Pixar, he had to defer. And the experience of deferring, over many years, to people who knew more than he did about the thing that mattered most, seems to have taught him something about collaboration that he hadn't learned at Apple.
But Catmull also understood Jobs's value. Jobs had an instinct for presentation, for timing, for the dramatic gesture that could transform a company's fortunes. The decision to take Pixar public one week after Toy Story's opening was pure Jobs — a calculated bet on maximum emotional impact that no one else at Pixar would have made. Jobs also served, for many years, as Catmull's shield against the outside world. While Catmull focused on culture and production, Jobs handled investors, press, and the relentless demands of being a public company.
When Jobs died in 2011, Catmull lost a partner of twenty-five years. The collaboration had been contentious, productive, and transformative for both men. Catmull, characteristically, told the story not as a personal drama but as an organizational lesson: the value of working with someone whose strengths are radically different from your own, whose blind spots are different from your blind spots, whose presence forces you to see things you would otherwise miss.
The Unseen Forces
In 2014, Catmull published Creativity, Inc., co-written with journalist Amy Wallace. The book was, on its surface, a business memoir — the story of Pixar, told by its president. But its actual subject was epistemology. How do you know what you don't know? How do you build an organization that can perceive its own blind spots? How do you maintain a creative culture when every force in organizational life — hierarchy, efficiency, risk aversion, the natural human desire to avoid conflict — conspires to destroy it?
Forbes called it "just might be the best business book ever written." Fast Company declared it "might be the most thoughtful management book ever." The praise was remarkable for a book whose central argument was, essentially, I don't know what's going wrong, and neither do you, and the best we can do is build systems that help us find out.
The book's intellectual framework was built on a paradox: the most dangerous problems in any organization are invisible to the people in charge. Not because those people are incompetent, but because the structure of organizations — the flow of information, the dynamics of power, the incentives to please the boss — systematically filters out the truth. "There is something going on here and I don't know what it is," Catmull told an Economist audience. "And I have to start with that premise."
This was not false modesty. It was an operating principle. Catmull genuinely believed — based on decades of observation — that his ratio of wrong theories to right theories would remain roughly constant for his entire life. "When I went to the next place, I had these theories. Half my theories were right. And half were complete crock," he told Adam Grant. "And I'll bet that my ratio of wrong to right was probably gonna stay the same for the rest of my life." The discipline was not to stop being wrong but to build environments where wrongness could be detected and corrected before it became catastrophic.
If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
— Ed Catmull, Computer History Museum
The Quiet Exit
Catmull announced his retirement in October 2018, at the age of seventy-three. He stayed in an advisory role through July 2019. He was not replaced. His departure came five months after John Lasseter stepped down amid allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior — a crisis that, in its way, tested Catmull's own philosophy about unseen forces and organizational blind spots. Pete Docter, the director of Monsters, Inc., Up, Inside Out, and Soul, was named Pixar's chief creative officer. Jennifer Lee, co-director of Frozen, took the same role at Disney Animation.
In 2019, Catmull and Pat Hanrahan shared the A.M. Turing Award — computing's Nobel Prize — "for their fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics." Hanrahan, a Stanford professor who had been one of Catmull's early hires at Pixar and the architect of RenderMan, the rendering software that powered not only Pixar's films but more than 90% of Academy Award-winning visual effects films over two decades, was the technical partner to Catmull's organizational vision. The award recognized not just their individual contributions but the productive partnership between them — a partnership that, like Catmull's collaboration with Lasseter and with Jobs, depended on complementary skills and mutual trust.
Since retirement, Catmull has continued to speak, consult, and reflect. An expanded edition of Creativity, Inc. was published in June 2023, with two new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and updated reflections on the years since his departure. At seventy-nine, he returned to Salt Lake City in September 2024 to receive the Leonardo Award from The Leonardo Museum, honoring individuals whose work exemplifies the blend of art and science. He arrived wearing worn-in jeans, a gray T-shirt, and unbranded sneakers.
The man who had spent fifty years building the scaffolding for other people's visions — the tools, the culture, the organizational architecture that enabled thousands of artists and engineers to produce the most successful run of animated films in history — accepted the award in the city where he had grown up watching Peter Pan and decided he wanted to make movies. He had made the movies. He had done it not by drawing, not by directing, not even by writing code, but by designing environments where creativity could survive its own fragility. The plaster hand, the one he had cast in 1972 and mapped with 350 polygons, is now in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It sits in a glass case, palm open, fingers slightly curled — the first artifact of a revolution that took two decades to begin, and that began with a patient man who knew what he couldn't draw and built the machine that would draw it for him.
7.
8.Keep your organizations separate to preserve diversity.
9.Manage dynamics, not ideas.
10.Balance between clarity and chaos — and stay there.
11.Use crisis as a signal, not a catastrophe.
12.Build for the half-century dream, not the quarterly result.
Principle 1
People over ideas — always.
Catmull's most famous dictum — "If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better" — was not a platitude. It was a direct rebuke to the prevailing Hollywood wisdom. He once had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio who declared that his central problem was finding good ideas, not good people. Catmull was astounded. The studio executive's belief, he argued, "is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product."
At Pixar, the implication was structural. The development department spent most of its time not evaluating ideas but building teams. When choosing which projects to greenlight, Catmull and Lasseter focused first on the director — their vision, their ability to lead a team, their resilience under pressure — and only secondarily on the concept. Ratatouille (a rat who cooks), WALL-E (a robot alone on a trash-covered Earth), Up (an elderly widower flying his house with balloons) — none of these were obviously commercial ideas. They were ideas entrusted to extraordinary directors working within extraordinary teams.
Tactic: When evaluating any new initiative, ask first "Who is the team?" rather than "What is the idea?" — and invest more energy in assembling and supporting the right people than in perfecting the concept.
Principle 2
Remove power from the feedback mechanism.
The Braintrust's defining feature was not its candor but its structural powerlessness. Catmull understood that the quality of feedback is inversely proportional to the authority of the people giving it. When a boss gives a note, it's an instruction. When a peer gives a note, it's a gift. The Braintrust had no ability to override the director, no vote, no veto. This wasn't a weakness — it was the design.
"If they know that John or I can override the director, then they will enter the room in a defensive posture," Catmull explained. "Basically we remove the power structure from the room." The result was that directors could hear difficult truths without feeling threatened, and note-givers could be blunt without worrying about political consequences. The absence of authority created the conditions for honesty.
Catmull tried to replicate the Braintrust model for Pixar's technical teams and initially failed. The reason: in the technical groups, the dynamics of authority hadn't been adequately removed. The principle was more fragile than it appeared — it required constant vigilance against the creep of hierarchy.
Tactic: When designing feedback processes, strip out every possible power dynamic. The people giving feedback should have zero ability to impose consequences — no firing authority, no budget control, no formal approval role. Then make that powerlessness explicit and visible to everyone in the room.
Principle 3
Assume your biggest problems are invisible.
"The things that are happening now that are wrong at Pixar are already happening and I can't see them." This was not a one-time confession — it was a permanent operating assumption. Catmull believed that every successful organization accumulates hidden dysfunctions that are invisible to leadership, and that the leader's primary job is not to solve known problems but to create systems that reveal unknown ones.
He had watched this dynamic destroy companies he admired. Evans & Sutherland had the lead in computer graphics and lost it through decisions that were, in his words, "obvious at the time stupid." Silicon Graphics followed the same trajectory. In both cases, the leaders were smart, experienced, and committed. They failed not because they lacked intelligence but because they lacked information — or more precisely, because the information that would have saved them was present in the organization but could not reach the people who needed it.
Catmull's response was to build multiple channels for surfacing truth: the Braintrust, dailies, postmortems after every film, and eventually Notes Day — a company-wide event in which all of Pixar stopped working on films for a day to discuss what wasn't working and why.
Tactic: Begin every strategic review with the question "What are we not seeing?" — and build at least three distinct mechanisms (peer review, anonymous feedback, structured postmortems) for surfacing problems that the normal chain of command would filter out.
Principle 4
Make it safe to tell the truth — then verify that it's actually safe.
Catmull drew a sharp distinction between believing you've created a safe environment and actually having created one. "Most people would agree that you need to create environments where it's safe for people to say what they think," he told Y Combinator. "But a lot of managers don't realize that they're not actually making safe environments. In other words, it's an agreement in idea but not in practice."
The gap between aspiration and reality was, in Catmull's view, the most common leadership failure. Managers assume that because they've stated a value ("we welcome dissent"), the value is operative. But stating a value does nothing to address the structural and emotional reasons people suppress truth: fear of embarrassment, fear of retaliation, desire to please the boss, reluctance to be the bearer of bad news.
At Pixar, this meant designing specific practices — the silent-leader rule in meetings, the Braintrust's lack of authority, the postmortem process — that created safety through structure rather than through declaration. And it meant constantly testing whether the safety was real, not merely perceived.
🔍
The Safety Gap
The difference between declared values and lived values.
What leaders say
What actually happens
"My door is always open."
People fear being seen walking into the boss's office with a complaint.
"We welcome constructive criticism."
The first person who criticizes a senior leader's project gets sidelined.
"We learn from failure."
Performance reviews penalize anyone whose project was restructured.
"We value diverse perspectives."
The loudest voices in the room determine the direction.
Tactic: Don't ask whether your team feels safe to disagree. Ask what specific structural mechanism prevents retaliation, and test it by observing who actually speaks up — and what happens to them when they do.
Principle 5
Accept that everything starts as a mess.
"It always sucks — and I don't mean that in a self-effacing way. I mean, it always sucks." Catmull's insistence that early-stage work is inherently terrible was not a confession of inadequacy but a foundational design principle. If you expect the first draft to be good, you will either avoid ambitious projects (because ambitious projects are more likely to fail early) or you will panic when the inevitable problems emerge and make bad decisions under pressure.
Pixar's entire production system was designed around the assumption of initial failure. The Braintrust, dailies, and iterative screening process existed not to prevent failure but to detect and correct it. The company's willingness to absorb the enormous cost of complete restarts — Toy Story 2, Ratatouille, The Good Dinosaur — was predicated on this assumption. If you know the first version will be bad, you budget for revision. If you pretend the first version will be good, you have no margin for error.
Catmull was explicit that the word "failure" was itself misleading. "We rarely used the terminology of failure," he told the Rotman School. "The mindset was more about constantly asking, 'Okay everyone, is this working?' If the answer was no, then it was 'Let's try this' — and so on." The distinction matters: "failure" implies a judgment about the person or team. "Not working yet" implies a stage in a process.
Tactic: Budget time, money, and emotional energy for at least two complete iterations before expecting quality. Build review mechanisms that ask "Is this working?" rather than "Who is responsible for this not working?"
Principle 6
Protect the new from the system that favors the old.
"When someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined," Catmull wrote, "but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched — and that is precisely what is most exciting about it." The organizational challenge is that every system — every budget process, every approval chain, every performance review — is optimized for the established. The new has no champion, no track record, no constituency. It is vulnerable to the skepticism of people who are comfortable with the existing way of doing things.
Catmull saw this as a structural problem, not a cultural one. Culture can help, but culture alone cannot overcome the institutional bias toward incumbency. What's needed is deliberate, active protection — a leader who consciously shields fragile new ideas from the forces that would kill them before they have a chance to develop.
At Pixar, this meant giving directors the final say on their films even when the Braintrust had serious concerns. It meant allowing projects to remain in development for years before they were ready. It meant tolerating ambiguity, resisting the demand for premature clarity, and trusting that the iterative process would eventually produce something worth releasing.
Tactic: Identify the three strongest institutional forces working against new initiatives in your organization (budget cycles, approval hierarchies, consensus culture) and design explicit protections against each one.
Principle 7
Never repeat your method — even when it works.
"If something works, you shouldn't do it again," Catmull told Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference. "We want to do something that is new, original — something where there's a good chance of failure." This was not contrarianism. It was a survival strategy. In a creative business, the temptation to repeat a successful formula is enormous — audiences want sequels, investors want predictability, teams want the comfort of proven methods. But repetition is the first step toward creative bankruptcy.
Pixar's commitment to originality was operationalized in a simple ratio: two-thirds original films, one-third sequels. The sequels — Toy Story 2, Finding Dory, Incredibles 2 — generated enormous revenue and were, in many cases, excellent films. But Catmull insisted they exist in proportion to original work, not as a replacement for it.
The deeper principle was about emotional range. "With every one of our films we try to touch emotions, but we don't try to touch the same emotions each time," Catmull said. The goal was not a formula but a habit of reaching — each film attempting something the studio hadn't done before, each creative team facing a problem that couldn't be solved by looking at how the last team solved theirs.
Tactic: After a success, explicitly prohibit the team from reusing the same approach on the next project. Force the articulation of what will be different — not incrementally different, but fundamentally different.
Principle 8
Keep your organizations separate to preserve diversity.
When Catmull took over Disney Animation in addition to Pixar, the obvious move was to merge the two studios. He refused. The reasons were threefold and instructive: autonomy breeds ownership ("Nobody bailed us out, we did it"), distinct cultures produce distinct art, and separation creates technical and artistic diversity that a merged organization would lose.
The discipline required to maintain separation was severe. When both Ratatouille and Bolt were in trouble simultaneously, Catmull could have sent Pixar people to help Disney or vice versa. He didn't. "We drew a hard line." The short-term cost was real — both teams suffered through their crises without reinforcements. The long-term benefit was that each studio developed the internal resilience and creative identity that no amount of outside help could provide.
This principle extended beyond studio separation to the way Catmull thought about technology sharing. Ideas were shared freely between the studios. Specific implementations were not. "The fundamental underlying pipeline is different so some things you can give and some you can't," he explained. "So a lot of the sharing is actually of ideas that can be implemented in different places."
Tactic: When managing multiple teams, resist the efficiency argument for consolidation. Maintain structural independence even when it's painful, and share principles and knowledge rather than specific tools or people.
Principle 9
Manage dynamics, not ideas.
"As a manager, you want to focus on the dynamics of your team, not the ideas they are producing," Catmull said at Stanford. "Sit back, really look at what's going on in the room." This was a radical claim for a company whose products were, in the end, ideas — stories, characters, visual innovations. But Catmull believed that the quality of a team's dynamics was both a better predictor of success and a more actionable lever than the quality of its ideas.
The logic was simple: ideas are abundant, but the conditions under which good ideas can develop and survive are rare. A team with healthy dynamics — trust, candor, shared purpose, constructive conflict — will generate and refine good ideas naturally. A team with unhealthy dynamics will destroy good ideas and entrench bad ones, regardless of the talent involved.
Catmull's diagnostic for team health was observable behavior in meetings: Who speaks? Who stays silent? Does the energy in the room feel generative or defensive? Are people building on each other's ideas or protecting their own? When the dynamics are right, the ideas take care of themselves.
Tactic: In your next team review, spend zero time evaluating the ideas on the table and all your time observing how the team interacts. Who defers to whom? Where are the silences? What's being said in the hallway that isn't said in the room?
Principle 10
Balance between clarity and chaos — and stay there.
"Most of our people have learned that it isn't helpful to ask for absolute clarity," Catmull told McKinsey. "They know absolute clarity is damaging because it means that we aren't responding to problems and that we will stop short of excellence. They also don't want chaos; if it gets too messy, they can't do their jobs."
This was Catmull's most counterintuitive insight about creative leadership: the optimal state is not order, not disorder, but the uncomfortable middle ground between the two. Too much clarity means the plan has become a straitjacket. Too much chaos means people can't function. The leader's job is to maintain the balance — intervening when things get too messy, loosening control when things get too rigid.
This requires a tolerance for ambiguity that most managers find excruciating. Catmull explicitly rejected mission statements as tools for providing clarity, arguing that "anything that stops people from thinking is not good." Pixar had no formal mission statement. When asked about the company's values, Catmull said he wanted "hard discussions," not easy answers: "Values are easy to state but hard to live."
Tactic: When your team asks for a clear direction, resist the urge to provide one prematurely. Instead, articulate the constraints ("We must ship a great product") and the boundaries ("Here's what we will not do") — and leave the path between those boundaries deliberately open.
Principle 11
Use crisis as a signal, not a catastrophe.
"Every film gets in trouble at some point," Catmull observed. This was not a complaint — it was a design specification. At Pixar, crisis was expected, planned for, and used as a diagnostic tool. The question was never "Did we have a crisis?" but "What did the crisis reveal, and did we have the capacity to respond?"
Catmull's attitude toward crisis was shaped by his observation of companies that didn't experience visible crises — and then collapsed. The absence of crisis, in his view, was not a sign of health but a sign that problems were being hidden. "Organizations are inherently unstable," he told a Pixar audience. "You have to work to keep them going." Postmortems after every film — even the hits — were designed to surface the crises that had been successfully resolved, so that the lessons could be extracted before memory faded.
The practice of pulling the plug on a film that wasn't working, while expensive and painful, sent what Catmull called "a major signal to the organization — that we're not going to let something bad out. And they really value that."
Tactic: After every completed project, conduct a structured postmortem that treats successes and failures with equal analytical rigor. Ask not just "What went wrong?" but "What went right by accident, and what crisis did we successfully navigate that we should learn from?"
Principle 12
Build for the half-century dream, not the quarterly result.
Catmull's career was defined by an unusual temporal orientation. From 1972, when he made the plaster-hand film, to 1995, when Toy Story was released, he pursued a single goal for twenty-three years. During that period, he worked at five different organizations (University of Utah, a brief stint at Applicon, NYIT, Lucasfilm, Pixar), and each move was a step toward the same destination. He did not pivot. He did not chase adjacent opportunities. He refined his tools, built his team, and waited for the technology to catch up with his vision.
This patience was not passive. It was an active, strategic commitment to long-term thinking in an industry — and a culture — that rewards short-term results. At Pixar, it manifested in the willingness to invest years in developing a film before it was ready, to absorb the cost of restarts, to prioritize the quality of the next release over the efficiency of the production pipeline. The business logic was clear: a great film generates returns for decades through theatrical re-releases, home video, merchandise, and theme park attractions. A mediocre film generates brief revenue and long-term brand damage.
But the deeper logic was personal. Catmull had spent his entire life building toward something that most people told him was impossible. The experience of sustained, patient commitment to a distant goal — and the eventual achievement of that goal — shaped his conviction that the most important things take the longest, and that the leader's job is to protect the organization's capacity for long-term investment against the constant pressure for short-term results.
Tactic: Identify the single most important long-term investment your organization could make — the one that won't pay off for five or ten years — and protect it structurally from budget cuts, leadership changes, and quarterly reviews. Make it someone's explicit job to defend.
Part IIIQuotes / Maxims
In their words
A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people — it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I've asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there's a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn't disagree more with the studio executive.
— Ed Catmull, HBR, 2008
Most people would agree that you need to create environments where it's safe for people to say what they think. But a lot of managers don't realize that they're not actually making safe environments. In other words, it's an agreement in idea but not in practice. There's a perception that they're doing it when they're not.
— Ed Catmull, Y Combinator Q&A
If something works, you shouldn't do it again. We want to do something that is new, original — something where there's a good chance of failure.
— Ed Catmull, Fortune Brainstorm Tech
Rather than thinking, "OK, my job is to prevent or avoid all the messes," I just try to say, "well, let's make sure it doesn't get too messy."
— Ed Catmull, McKinsey Quarterly
In meetings, if there were three people in the room with more power than the others, for the first 15 minutes, they knew they had to remain silent. If they spoke first, they would set the tone, and we didn't want that.
— Ed Catmull, Rotman School of Management
Maxims
Teams fix ideas; ideas don't fix teams. The quality of the people and their dynamics will determine the outcome far more than the brilliance of the initial concept. Invest in assembling and supporting the right group before perfecting the plan.
Powerlessness is the precondition for honesty.Feedback mechanisms work only when the people giving feedback have zero authority over the people receiving it. Strip power from the room and candor will fill the vacuum.
Your blind spots are structural, not personal. The information you're missing isn't hidden because you're careless — it's hidden because hierarchy, politeness, and fear of conflict filter it out. Build systems that circumvent the filter.
Premature clarity kills creativity. The demand for a clear plan too early in the process produces a plan that nobody believes in. Tolerate ambiguity long enough for the real shape of the work to emerge.
Every first draft is supposed to be terrible. If you treat early-stage imperfection as failure, you'll either avoid ambitious work or panic when it inevitably struggles. Budget for iteration, not perfection.
Separation preserves diversity. Merging teams for efficiency destroys the distinct cultures, techniques, and identities that produce genuinely different work. Keep organizations independent even when consolidation seems logical.
More truth in the hallway than the meeting room is the diagnostic. If people say different things in private than they say in front of leadership, your culture of candor is performative. The gap between hallway talk and meeting talk is the measure of organizational health.
The most important signal is what you refuse to release. Pulling the plug on a flawed project — absorbing the cost, the delay, the pain — tells the organization you mean it when you say quality matters. Every other signal is noise.
Success is a better liar than failure. Failure forces introspection. Success permits the delusion that everything you did was right. Postmortems after hits are more important than postmortems after misses.
Patient obsession compounds. Catmull pursued a single vision for twenty-three years across five organizations before achieving it. The most consequential work is built on timescales that make most people uncomfortable — and most investors impatient.
