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← Back to IdeasKen Roman's Five Best Books on Creativity & Ideas
“Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull
Ideas are like babies. They are born small and immature. At Pixar, early mock-ups of films are called “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful miniatures, says Pixar’s co-founder and president Ed Catmull. They are awkward, unformed, vulnerable and incomplete, and must be protected from being judged too quickly.
Pixar exudes creativity from its offices (designed by Steve Jobs) to a culture that spawns films like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Inside Out. Catmull sets forth the principles that made it (and Disney) the dominant force in computer animated films. The key is “Inc.” in the book’s title, Creativity, Inc. To be a truly creative organization, he explains, you must start things that might fail. Braintrust, an internal mechanism, pushes for excellence and roots out mediocrity. Pixar University helps employees keep learning.
Pixar places the highest value on talented storytellers. “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up,” Catmull warns. “If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away or come up with something better.” Leading him to conclude that people are more important than ideas.
“The Act of Creation” by Arthur Koestler
This doorstop 708-page book (referencing 337 books and articles) makes a seminal point: “The creative act … does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.” A polymath, Arthur Koestler ranges across philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, literature, science, even humor, to put forward a general theory of creativity. He concludes these disparate fields share a common pattern which he terms “bisociation,” a bringing together of two unconnected fields of thought.
Koestler makes the distinction between thinking on a single plane and the creative act which “always operates on more than one plane.” His studies include jokes, where the audience is led to expect an outcome, but a punch line replaces the original matrix with an alternative to comic effect. The structure of a joke is essentially bait-and-switch. The recognition of two matrices fused into a new synthesis is the “aha” moment.
This column is an example of bisociation – taking books on disparate subjects and showing them in a new context.
“A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young
It’s only 35 pages – what do you have to lose? There’s a reason that it has been in print since the 1930s. It works! Even the author acknowledges that the technique is so simple that few believe in it.
The bad news, James Webb Young warns, is that it requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow. Worse, for some people no technique for producing ideas will help. But for those imaginative people who can never let well enough alone, the author puts forward a five-step process to produce ideas: gather material; seek new combinations; take a break; the idea will appear – write it down; refine and rework the idea.
A former ad agency vice president, Young reduces the creative process to its essence: “An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements,” echoing Koestler’s bisociation. Both Koestler and Sondheim (below) also advise dreams or the subconscious to generate ideas.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” by Marshall McLuhan
Where a message is carried has a major effect on the message, asserts the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. “The medium is the message.” McLuhan argues that every medium shapes content. Radio is not TV; digital is not analog. With historic and literary allusions, analogies and metaphors, McLuhan dissects major pre-internet media and divides them into “hot” (low audience involvement) media like movies and radio – and “cool” (high audience involvement) media like TV and phones.
McLuhan anticipated the internet nearly two decades before its official birth in 1973. In this 1964 book, he predicted “classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse information be found, the press will fold.” Newspapers and magazines, diminished if not extinct, have ceded their dominant position to Google.
McLuhan’s theory about the impact of a medium, not just the content, is validated in how social media influences today – and how Facebook for example doesn’t want you to know that. Understanding Media was prophetic in identifying “the global village,” made possible by the internet. The tech newsletter Stratechery concurs. “The entire world is just waking up to the reality that the Internet is not simply a new medium, but a new maker of reality.”
“Finishing The Hat” and “Look, I Made a Hat” by Stephen Sondheim
Which comes first – the music or the lyrics? “The phone call,” jibed one Broadway veteran. Stephen Sondheim’s two-volume collection of lyrics and commentary starts with lyrics (“Music is a language which everyone knows but only musicians speak.”) His mantra for lyrics: “Content Dictates Form.” “Less is More.” “God is in the Details.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical with West Side Story, Company, and Sunday in the Park with George allows that following this mantra rigorously will produce a “respectable” lyric. A feeling for music and rhythm, plus a sense of theater, can make it “interesting.” Humor, style, and imagination may make it “good.” With an understanding composer and stimulating book writer, “the sky’s the limit.”
A master class in creativity, both books illustrate the collaborative process with lessons from theater greats like Leonard Bernstein: (“the only chances worth taking are big ones.”) Sondheim adds that all the mistakes Bernstein made, if indeed they were mistakes, were huge – “he never fell off the lowest rung of the ladder.”) Two Sondheim books push this article over the stipulated Five Best. One precept of creativity is knowing the rules – and knowing when to break them.