Since its inception, Pixar has won numerous awards both in technological innovation and creativity. The company is one of the pioneers in the computer-generated imagery (CGI) animated featured film with its release of Toy Story in 1995 and has established itself as one of the most creative and outstanding company in the animation and digital graphics industry. Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar has attributed the success of the company to three unique merits; open culture, supportive leadership and group collaboration, which have allowed creativity to permeate Pixar.

However, Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson, authors of "Innovate the Pixar Way", believe that the spirit of Pixar’s key creativity lies in its childlike attitude and positive mindset. In fact, Pixar inspire followers to be like a child: to dream like one, trust in their workplace buddies, venture into the unknown, as well as unleash and maximize on their childlike capability.

For this book review, I will analyze the three key points presented by Ed Catmull in his discussion: open culture, supportive leadership and group collaboration and relate its content to 3 different models: Tri-Component of Creativity, Transformational Leadership and Hot group.

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Using the Tri-Component Model to examine how Pixar is a creative corporation, this segment will analyse the three different components – expertise, motivation and creative-thinking skills.

Expertise

Employees of Pixar are all highly qualified as they have the respective skills needed to succeed in their duties. Most of them have years of experience in the computer graphics animated industry and have received formal education related to the field. Pixar also set up a university to allow new employees to learn the skills they require and explore other topics and subjects that might interest them and compliment their skill set. Veteran staff and senior executive are also allowed to expand their learning horizon beyond their fields of expertise. The university creates an avenue where everyone would learn collaboratively.

Creative-thinking

Pixar recognizes that creativity comes inherently to children and tries to bring its workforce back to childhood to nurture their creativity. As opposed to most organizations today, the company gives its employees the freedom to explore and express themselves. Pixar offers its employees rewards for their active imagination as they recognize that imagination is what drives people to be more adventurous in discovering and taking on new things. The essence of creativity is childlikeness and imagination. Hence, Pixar avidly incites its employees to let loose, let their childlike energy take over and be risk takers and dream pursuers. The culture of mutual respect and trust in which people have the freedom to engage in open, creative dialogue with one another has given the employee the opportunity to exercise creative thinking in their daily problem solving and brain storming session in the workplace.

Motivation

While most filmmakers are motivated with extrinsic motivation of huge monetary enticements, Ed Catmull believes that the foremost source of motivation in Pixar is considered intrinsic self-fulfillment. Employees in Pixar are 100 percent self-motivated to come up with innovative and original ideas and to produce movies with the best of their ability. They often go beyond their scope of duties to explore new methods and technology that may aid them in bringing out the best visual and all round experience in their film. He further pointed out that the motivation to film Toy Story was just to make a film that their friends and themselves can enjoy.

Ed Catmull’s hot group

The presence of hot-groups is notable in Ed Catmull’s organization, Pixar. The accomplishment of Pixar’s box-office hits like Toy Story, are accredited to dedicated and motivated teams. They desired novel ideas and ingenious integration of new technology into the movie that were not thought of by entertainment filmmakers previously. I will examine some conditions in Pixar that gives rise to the hot-groups phenomenon.

Openness and Flexibility

Pixar corporate culture has no hierarchical makeup and the structure is relatively flat. There is great amount of autonomy and freedom in its offices. Flat structure allows communication to travel seamlessly without impediment, where a tall structure would slow down creativity and the innovative processes. Pixar’s open environment has encouraged collaboration among employees from different backgrounds, disciplines and positions.

The establishment of open communication culture within the organization allows employees to approach anyone regardless of ranks and titles. Employees also have the flexibility to learn new skills and knowledge on other functions of the company and collaborate with employees from other departments. All of these qualities help to foster trust and mutual respect in Pixar offices. The corporate structure of Pixar is similar to IDEO, a creative consulting company introduced in class. Interaction between employees and management is brought about by the flatter hierarchy structure and open communication.

Independence & Autonomy

Imagination and dreams are highly encouraged in a company like Pixar as it is key. Pixar considers that the key motivational force in people is the pursuit of their dreams. Thus high level of autonomy and independence are granted to hot groups to come out with a new and novel storyboard and to develop their ideas. Usually 4 months or more are given to come out with the presentation of the new ideas. The groups are granted the freedom and autonomy to choose the kind of storyline and the resources they need to accomplish their creation. Employees are often seen proposing new solutions and ideas to their superior instead of following directions. The high level of independence and autonomy has fostered a high level of creativity among its employees.

Pixar has also created a conducive workplace for employees to design their workplace and communal areas are set up to allow employees to play together. Pixar understands that play is required for employees to cultivate their imagination and gives them plenty of room to have fun and explore different avenues for work. The setting and workplace environment of Pixar’s offices is favorable for creativity to thrive with its pleasant and non-corporate ambiance. For instance, the center stage is set with Steve Jobs’ inspired design of the rounded metallic roof that look like an airplane hangar. No conscientiously clean hallways are to be found as empty spaces are decorated with sculptures to spark creativity thinking. In addition, Pixar allows its staffs to personalize their office space according to their preference, which is one way of allowing employees to bring the element of fun into their workplace and stimulating their creativity simultaneously. This provides social interaction for and amongst employees and creates a happy and relaxed environment for them to generate and share ideas. With a conducive workplace environment and a high level of autonomy and independence, Pixar has fostered an environment where creativity can flourish limitlessly.

People First

Pixar places a lot of importance in the identification and selection process to find suitable candidates in the formation of hot groups. Pixar often select candidates with high aptitude in teamwork qualities and possess diverse backgrounds. With a pool of talented and highly distinguishable candidates, successful hot groups can be formed. Pixar gives hot groups plenty of space and opportunities to interact and build challenging tasks. High level of support and adequate resources are given to hot groups to enable them to flourish. Employees’ input and sharing are greatly valued. The supportive leadership in Pixar also provides encouragement and praise to hot groups and failures and errors are accepted as part of the journey. These characteristics of Pixar’s people policy are similar to the four proficiencies of "Art A Team Sport". The four proficiencies are as follows: depth to have the ability to perform and finish the project, breadth to be predisposed to explore new and a variety of interests, communication to have the aptitude to take in both positive and negative feedback without the fear of failure, and collaboration to have the capability of bringing the three above proficiencies.

When discussing teamwork, IDEO stands out again. Like Pixar, the organization believes in its employees and their ability to collaborate and work together. It has a strong culture of mixing and mashing employees from different places and varied backgrounds to increase the levels of creativity and a variety of imaginative ideas.

The formation of a successful hot group has brought about tremendous benefit to the organization as creativity and innovations are flourishing generating new income for the company. However it is challenging to manage hot groups and it takes a lot of support and effort to nurture it. Pixar has demonstrated that when hot groups are properly managed they can yield high results.

Transformational Leadership

In today’s world, most organizations teach their employees to follow their leader as they are always right. This stifles creativity and develops groupthink within the organization. However, in Pixar, employees are nurtured to be self-motivated thinkers to find new and innovative concepts and use their diversity to benefit the organisation. Using the Transformational Leadership Model, it allows us to understand how Ed Catmull encourage and stimulate creativity in his organization. Four dimensions of creativity will be discussed – Idealized influence, Inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation; and individualized consideration.

Idealized Influence

Ed Catmull is an outstanding role model when it comes to creativity as he reinvented animated feature film technology, set a new standard for storytelling, and masterfully established an innovative corporate culture. Many employees are inspired by his philosophy of refusal to take shortcuts, by fulfilling the promise of bringing the story to life in each and every movie they make. His trademark? "Quality is the best business plan of all" (Ed Catmull, 2008). It has made all his employees strive for the highest quality in their work. Pixar employees have embarked on a journey together, nurturing one another in an environment of mutual respect and trust. He earns the respect from his employees over time through his exhibit of high level of respect and trust for his employee. Ed believes in his team and their power to transform ordinary ideas into extraordinary inspiration. In his rebuffing of employment contracts, he also validates mutual employer to employee relationship. He deems that employee contracts are an exhibition of organizational control and power and would serve as an impediment where open communication is vital.

Inspirational Motivation

Ed Catmull creates a distinctive corporate culture where employees are inspired and intrinsically motivated to be creative in their work. The establishment of a clear vision of the company was communicated effectively its employees. This culture could be explained through seeing from the "eyes of a child". Pixar understands that children are innately creative and encourages employees to embrace the inner child in them. Employees are intrinsically motivated to produce the best results in their work as they find fulfillment in the satisfaction of moviegoers. Pixar engage their teams by providing them with vast spaces and opportunities to discover new things and make ambitious dreams. All the required tools and information for accomplishment are given to employees and the management places high level of trust in them to excel in their work. It rewards out-of-the-box thinking, and even emboldens failure so as to keep the employees from sticking to their comfort zone. After all, the core of creativity is childlikeness and imagination.

Intellectual Stimulation

Being in an industry where innovation and creativity is highly important, the company cannot anticipate the response from the audience when they produce a new animation. Thus, an important criterion the organization has to overcome is "risk minimization". Employees are constantly encouraged to come out with new and novel ideas and products. Production teams set their own schedules and track all of the various aspects of the filmmaking process, even their own budgets. Naturally, there is enormous pressure to produce new and stimulating stories in the organization as every Pixar project takes about four years to be shown on the big screen. It is an exceptionally disciplined process with project deadlines and delivery dates, but creativity in the organization is never crushed. Employees are incessantly challenged to bring out both practicality and creativity while working with the constraints imposed upon them. The challenge provides intellectual stimulations to the employee and forces them to think out of the box. Pixar’s corporate culture allows employees to accept uncertainty with their new product and enables them to recover when failing. Failures are often celebrated with the same intensity as success. The failure-tolerant culture has made employees take on greater responsibility and challenge in attaining higher success. And though they may enjoy some success, employees are relentless in their continual pursuit to producing the next great novel animation film and climb a higher mountain to achieve greater heights.

The risk taking culture in Pixar is similar to SAATCHI & SAATCHI case study. The company often seeks to reward risk taking behavior but never punishes failure as novel ideas are often produced through risk taking actions.

Individualized Consideration

The most common problem Ed Catmull sees is that organizations deal with is in discovering good employees. He believes that able people are the ones who would hold the fort and bring the company up should it take a risk and suffer a fall. This is especially common in Pixar. All the more it is important for Pixar to build its people and effective communication amongst its people. Pixar has built its own community and extends a sizeable arm to aid and support its people. Hence, Pixar’s employee retention rate has remained high and few ever quit. The company believes in its people and invests time, resources and money in practices to manage their talents. Pixar empowers and energize their employees by providing them with an on-the-job training program as well as an on-going education. An example of the organization’s investment is Pixar University. Pixar understands that each and every one of its staffs is an enormous asset to the company. The company’s university offers more than a hundred programs in different disciplines, such as technology, arts and communication etc. This is to foster the staff’s creativity. As employees are able to increase their knowledge base, this allows them to come out with better solutions and ideas. Employees are given the autonomy to choose any course they want and four hours of classes each week is counted towards the employees work time. Pixar implements a system called the "brain trust" in its projects. The "brain trust" is basically a group that comprises of eight directors and available team members. The team provides feedback to develop the present state of the film and the necessary backup required for the success of the movie.

Ed Catmull believes that communication and supportiveness have to be provided among all the employees. The open communication among management and employee allows trust and mutual respect to flourish as no one is being neglected in the company. The implementation of "Dailies" is essentially a way for employees to receive regular feedback on their current work. "Dailies" encourages creativity, as everyone is encouraged and inspired by the positive achievement of fellow colleagues and it also allows open communication throughout the whole organization.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, Pixar is an excellent corporation with a robust communal culture, where trust and respect are extremely prized. The company recognizes that its employees are the most important assets and it spends huge amount of time and resources to nurture them. It allows them to play in the work environment to nurture and instill creativity in them. This has birthed much creativity and innovation in the workplace during work hours as ideas are often generated from group and individual playtime in the office. Hot groups also flourish in this sort of environment. The company empowers hot groups with high levels of autonomy and freedom, challenging tasks and a supportive leadership, which instill strong intrinsic motivation among the employees. With a transformational style leadership, it does encourage creative behaviors. Employees are incited to explore and defy the status quo in problem solving. The qualities of a transformational leader enhance the creativity and innovation exploration and employees are more likely to work harder in achieving organization goals and objective because their leader serves as a positive role model. Lastly, the company believes that open communication and strong leadership supportiveness (autonomy and freedom) are two key attributions to the success of Pixar. Open environments where individuals can collaborate and hot groups can be formed and flourished are considered to be crucial in large organizations such as Pixar. Its belief has been continued and practiced till today as it aims to produce more revolutionary films in the animation and digital graphics industry.

This book can serve as an example for companies that wish to implement play into their corporate culture. The benefits of an environment that embrace play will motivate high level of intrinsic motivation and creativity in the workplace. It also inspires employees to come up with fresh and innovative ideas without the pressure of failure.

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