The Ugly Baby and the Beast.
Innovation drives growth. Run-the-business, the bottom-line.
So, what should you focus on?
One of the conundrum’s leaders face is ‘how do we balance innovation with driving business value’?
We all know the very famous founder of Pixar – Steve Jobs but we might not have heard of the co-founder, Ed Catmull.
One of his stories in his book Creativity Inc. is the Ugly baby and the Beast
“Early on, all of our movies suck”.- Pixar films are not good at first [ugly babies], and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’”
He describes how companies often don’t spend enough time nurturing and improving an initial idea and quickly produce something lacking because of the pressure to “feed the hungry beast.”
A beast is the business as usual that makes money and it is one that’s got to be fed.
And that is our reality – that the new ideas are fragile, they don’t look good, they take protection, you cannot judge them at that point.
Of course you can’t protect the baby forever. At some point, it has to grow up and change into something because sometimes the ugly baby would rather play in the sandbox forever.
That is a great analogy to the work we do in this space.
The innovative ideas though are like ugly babies and need people to champion and protect them.
And in the meantime, one ought to feed the beast and drive business value.
How do you balance the ugly baby and the beast?
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Ranjani Mani
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