Little Bets

right.  Little Bets is easily the most delightful ad useful innovation book published in the last decade.  Wow, that’s quite an endorsement, but with this day-glow green little book, the Mill Girl is won over.  It’s not just about scale and lofty thoughts, and playing football across the business landscape.  It’s about those glimmers…. those little images that are clearest at 5 am.Sims’ examples illustrate:

1.        Steve Jobs, of course. 

Steve Jobs, of course, at Pixar.  The Pixar story is historic both because of its timing, and Jobs unique perspective that he brought to this company.  After his ouster from Apple, Jobs was lured to Pixar when he, says Sims, “fell in love with the technology.”  Jobs bought the company from George Lucas in 1985 for $5M, hardly the cost of development.  Sims quotes David Price, author of The Pixar Touch,  about what happened next, saying that although Jobs did not anticipate that Pixar would produce revenues from animation when he invested,  Jobs decided to let the guy whose desk was in the hallway! (John Lasseter) run with it.  Hah!  Classic Jobs! 

The story gets better.  Lasseter’s salary was reported to be $140,000 per year.  He was directed to proceed with some little films, Little Bets.  Sims points out that ha Jobs based his strategy on what he could expect to gain in ROI, he would have stopped Lasseter’s group in its tracks.  Instead, the little team continued to experiment and perfect its software/hardware imaging and story-telling capabilities.  Partnering with Disney for Toy Story was the result.

2.        Frank Gehry

3.       Chris Rock, experimenting with rough material live, taking a little bet that even rough, the appearance, the event would lead to even bigger results.

4.       Hewlett-Packard stumbling onto milestone success of its first handheld calculator.  Bowmar was cool, but HP had legs.

5.       Amazon

6.       The US Army’s innovative approach to counterinsurgency ops.

The Mill Girl loves this little book because it’s not Michael Porter - its closer to idea generation and painfully close to the few crazy entrepreneurs she’s spent time with who may not talk a great game, whose daily activities don’t always make a lot of sense but somehow result in some pretty neat stuff.  Sims believes that although we may not all be hired for our creativity, and in fact in The Corporate World that may be discouraged, we can learn from this other approach:  failing fast to learn quickly, trying imperfect ideas (now rather than later), focusing on finding problems rather than solving them, and practicing highly immersed observation to turn little bets into big successes. 

Great fun, refreshing book.