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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Creativity INC is one of the best books I have ever read on creativity and I have read a lot to know how much most of them really suck.

It has the added bonus of providing an alternative biography of Steve Jobs which in itself is interesting.

It's much more than a story about Pixar. It's a great insight into some of the very problems you deal with as you build and try to maintain a culture.

I can't recommend it enough.

If you want a peek into the books content Ed Catmul did a great talk at Standford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhzXNJumqpo

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Creativity, Inc. is also one of the best books on management.

I say this with reverence for the work of Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming.

How does it compare to "pixar and beyond"?

I haven't read that one yet. Have you?

Yes, it's an amazing book. But it looks very similar, hence my question ;-)

Yes agree thats its primary value to me to.

Having read most of the "quality gurus" (including Deming) and a bit of Drucker...your comment catapulted the book up my reading list. Thx.

Analogous to the top ranked thread in this post about glorifying Rockefeller; Ed Catmull was implicated in artificial wage suppression practices and non-poaching agreements across his industry.

So, every silver lining has a cloud, it seems.

I was surprised too and saddened after the fact it seemed noone here has talked about the amount of malpractice, and predatory tactics either direcly practiced by rockefeller or associated to him.

I was a disappointed with it, I couldn't help feeling it was a little too self congratulatory all the way through. You could argue that was justified, after all Pixar has been very successful but it spoilt it for me.

I guess I read it different. I read it as what do you do once you established success. How do you make sure your culture doesn't suffer and become complacent which happens so often.

So it's selv congratulatory but only to make a very different point; Where do you go from success?

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