When to Ask Forgiveness and Secretly Build a Product, Anyway
Notes on protecting your baby tiger
It feels counterintuitive to keep ideas secret at work — and yet, we’ve all seen situations where organizations kill really good ideas. Organizations with and without models for disruptive innovation in place, doesn’t matter. If an idea is perceived to distract from the current top-down directives, it’s likely to face insurmountable opposition.
You can’t get the green light to build an idea without some sort of proof. And paradoxically, you often can’t get proof without building something.
So what do you do?
Give up?
Not if your idea is a baby tiger, you don’t.
Baby Tiger Ideas
Tigers may be an apex predator, but baby tigers need protecting until they’re more developed and able to fend for themselves in the wild. The baby tigers are those ideas that could be unstoppable, if only someone would see their potential and protect them.
A while back at eBay, someone spotted a baby tiger and a group of us took it upon ourselves to work together and protect it until it grew into a $2 billion business.
It was 2008.
