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

Catmull's account of running Pixar and later Disney Animation — thirty years of specific organisational practices designed to make creative work survive the forces that usually destroy it. The book is more honest than most business memoirs; Catmull is willing to describe failures in detail, including his own blind spots. For product direction the useful material is the mechanisms: the braintrust, the candour requirement, the structures that let painful feedback circulate without destroying relationships. Read alongside Capodagli and Jackson's Innovate the Pixar Way for the outside view. Cagan and everyone else who writes seriously about product culture is in debt to this book.