Immediate costs and rewards loom larger than future ones.
More quotesSuccess makes cowards of sensible organisations. Before the hit, everyone talks about bravery, instinct and changing the category. After the hit, the meeting fills with people whose job is to ensure lightning strikes in exactly the same approved place next Thursday. Hollywood gets sequels. Software gets another feature bolted onto the flagship. Retail gets twelve flavours of the bestseller and no shelf space for the strange little product that might matter in three years.
The logic is individually impeccable and collectively dangerous. The known idea has an audience, revenue history and forecast. The new idea has a scruffy prototype and several questions. Of course the spreadsheet prefers the sequel. Spreadsheets are brilliant at valuing evidence that already exists and bloody useless at valuing evidence an experiment might create. Keep choosing the defensible option and the company becomes magnificently efficient at serving yesterday.
I am not against sequels, extensions or squeezing value from a proven asset. That income should buy exploration, not suffocate it. Ring-fence money, time and senior attention for work that cannot arrive with the certainty of the incumbent. Judge early experiments by what they teach, not by whether they instantly rival the mature business. Playing safe does not remove risk. It swaps visible risk today for a larger, quieter risk later: waking up with a flawless portfolio of things people have stopped wanting.