Page 183 - Free the Idea Monkey

But when you dig a little deeper, you start to notice an incredibly

important aspect of inventiveness: for every yin, there is a yang. For

example, the next time you are marveling at the wonders of Disney,

make sure you remember Roy. While Walt was dreaming about his

Magic Kingdom and making a mouse talk,

his brother Roy was actually making Are you a

sure that Walt’s dreams would come Walt or a Roy?
Either answer is great as long as you
true. Roy was the operational genius; know what makes you feel strong.
a yin for Walt’s yang.

For every Idea Monkey who says

coming up with new concepts is a piece of cake, there

are others who say executing is easy. These are the operational

experts—the Roy Disneys if you will—who know how to drive the

best ideas forward. The corporate equivalent of Roy would be the

COOs. You don’t think of them as product innovators, but once they

have an idea, or are presented with one, they execute it.

IT’S TRUE FOR ME, TOO
In 2008, BusinessWeek published a photograph of Raphael (Raff)

Louis Vitón, the president of Maddock Douglas, and me to complement
our column “The Innovation Engine.” (Both the
column and the picture are still running.)

The picture was a photo-retouched beauty
constructed by one of their artists who
arranged two separate head shots into what
most describe as “a lovely engagement picture.”

Soon after, everyone in our office was call-
ing us “Siegfried and Roy, The Ambiguously
Innovative Duo” — not (to pay tribute to
Seinfeld) that there’s anything wrong with that.

As the old saying goes, behind every joke
there is some truth. The folks at Maddock Douglas know the truth.
Raff and I are a dynamic duo. For me, ideas are easy — but execu-
tion? Not so much. For Raff, the exact opposite is true.

And that is invariably the case. That is something that I learned
from the first days we opened our doors.

168 D I S C O V E R I N G A Y I N T O Y O U R Y A N G