Success can raise the bar for a company until the pressure for big results kills all creativity. It's that kind of pressure that prevented J.D. Salinger from writing a follow-on to The Catcher in the Rye. It's also why Robert Pirsig took thirty years after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to write his second book. And it's why James Cameron is only now wrapping up his first real movie since Titanic made him the king of the world.
In a business culture that likes to talk up big innovations, we may be lacking appreciation for the beauty of the small idea. Outsized ambitions can set you up for failure in a big way when you spend most of your time rejecting your own thinking. No one bats a thousand at coming up with big, disruptive innovations, so you need to explore all your ideas to find the great ones. Not only that, most really big ideas often look small to start. In their book The Granularity of Growth, strategy theorists Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit, and Mehrdad Baghai note that most billion-dollar business ideas look like $200 million ideas at the outset. Big growth happens when a lot of little things catch fire together.
via fastcompany.com