The Innovation Show

“If you give a ton of gold to an ant, it will only crush the ant.” — Sadhguru

The fastest route to innovation is not through resourcing. You can’t throw money, people, and infrastructure at a problem and expect it to disappear. Yet, that’s exactly what many organisations do. Like a child handed every toy at once, an innovation team given too much too soon loses its hunger, its resourcefulness, its fire.

Gold, in the wrong measure, doesn’t empower — it crushes.

Sadhguru’s metaphor — “If you give a ton of gold to an ant, it will only crush the ant” — is a caution against burdening the unready with blessings they have not yet grown into. A similar truth echoes in the world of innovation. Whether in fledgling startups or insulated innovation labs within mature organisations, overfunding can be as fatal as underfunding. When an idea is flooded with capital too early, it alters how teams show up. It replaces urgency with comfort. It erodes the grit that scrapes brilliance from constraint. And, perhaps most dangerously, it bypasses the slow, essential learning that makes future success sustainable — the kind of learning that only emerges when nothing is guaranteed, and everything must be earned.

(Under) Armour Forged Through Scarcity

Next week’s guest at The Reinvention Summit, Rita McGrath tells a powerful story in The End of Competitive Advantage about Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour, that drives this home. Plank didn’t build Under Armour with a war chest — he built it with sweat. A former football player at the University of Maryland, Plank was intimately familiar with the discomfort of soggy cotton shirts clinging to skin during brutal training sessions. What stayed dry were his synthetic compression shorts. That observation, born not from a focus group but from lived experience, planted the seed of a category-defining idea: performance wear for athletes.

But he wasn’t showered with venture capital or fast-tracked by incubators. Instead, Plank spent 1996 driving his Ford Explorer up and down the U.S. East Coast, hauling samples into locker rooms, persuading one athlete, one equipment manager, one coach at a time. His currency wasn’t funding — it was authenticity. His pitch wasn’t polished — it was personal. It was commitment without excess. Learning before investment.

Under Armour’s first breakthrough moment didn’t come from a million-dollar campaign. It came from a single line shouted by a teammate in a gritty ad:

“We must protect this house!”

https://medium.com/media/6aca24b81c6989957c1e6d149f39791f/href

The ad lived far beyond its 30 seconds. It became a meme before memes were memes. Stadium banners, locker room chants, even late-night talk shows echoed the cry. It was built on intimacy with the customer that only can be learned from scarcity and proximity.

If Plank had been handed millions on day one, would Under Armour have evolved the same way? Would the message have been as sharp? Or would it have become another overbuilt, overfunded idea, inflated beyond its readiness?

If he had millions, he may have hired a sales person, a marketing person, an influencer? In doing so, all learnings come back to him through the interpretation (and reward systems) of each of these nodes of his network. The bigger the team, the more nodes and the more likelihood of losing valuable learning.

Under Armour succeeded not in spite of constraint — but thanks to it. Every inch gained was earned. Every lesson learned was absorbed at full cost. And in that, they built not just a brand, but a belief system. In our “Leading The Revolution” series, Gary Hamel warns against organisations investing ahead of learning. In doing so, they risk “overdriving the opportunity.” He offers the brilliant example of Pret A Manger. If Under Armour was forged through friction, then Pret A Manger was tempered through time.

Pret A Manger’s Patience

We live in an age of acceleration. Speed is conflated with success. Funded startups are expected to sprint from idea to IPO, and internal innovation teams are told to “go big or go home.” But many of the most enduring innovations weren’t rushed — they were revealed, slowly, through patient, painstaking experimentation.

Gary Hamel told me that many organisations make the mistake of equating commitment with resource allocation: “We’ve put a lot of people on it. We’ve spent a lot of money.” But true commitment is intellectual and emotional. It’s curiosity without overreach. It’s saying, “We think there’s something important here. Let’s understand it — before we invest big.”

When we throw too much at a new initiative — especially one rooted in uncertainty — we set it up for failure. Not because the idea is bad, but because we’re pressing the accelerator before we’ve mapped the road.

Pret’s story is a testament to this. It took five years between opening their first and second store. Not because they lacked ambition. Not because they weren’t committed. But because they were learning. They were figuring out how to reinvent fast food without compromising freshness. They were rethinking everything: sourcing ingredients daily, ditching preservatives, avoiding shortcuts. The old models didn’t apply — and the new ones couldn’t be forced.

Had they been handed millions in VC funding early on, it’s likely they would’ve scaled prematurely — and failed. They couldn’t mass-produce until they truly understood.

This is exactly the trap Gary Hamel warns against: when you invest ahead of learning, you don’t scale a solution — you scale your assumptions. And if those assumptions are flawed, you’re not just wrong — you’re wrong at speed.

Pret didn’t fall for that. They embraced the slow burn. They stayed in the question longer. Constraint can be frustrating but it’s also the crucible where differentiation can be forged.

I experienced a similar 18-month journey firsthand with The Reinvention Summit.

Reinvention Earned, Not Spent

Most events only break even by their third or fourth edition — if they survive that long. That’s the accepted logic. The safe bet. The line item in spreadsheets and investor decks that justifies a slow build. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you have a safety net, you’ll use it. Not always consciously. But it lingers — giving you quiet permission to hold back. To skip that extra call. To delay that tough conversation. To leave a few things to chance.

For the Reinvention Summit, we did not hire sales team. The proposed marketing budget? Scrapped. Instead, I made a deliberate commitment: every speaker, every sponsor, every pixel of promotion would be personal. No middlemen. No filters. Just real engagement. And through that, I learned implicitly what each stakeholder truly needed. Not from a report or an emissary, but from 1–2–1 conversation. That level of learning can’t be outsourced. It shaped the soul of the summit.

With no quiet investor waiting in the wings, this wasn’t “one of many” projects — it was the project. I parked my next book to give it everything for 18 months. And when that happens, you don’t consult Excel — you consult instinct. You don’t model ROI — you model meaning.

It really changes everything.

Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich has been one of the most influential books on my mindset. He wrote that alibis are the real enemies of success. We don’t fail because we lack opportunity — we fail because we justify our inaction. We point to circumstances, timing, resources. But what if we removed the excuses?

I always wanted to do The Innovation Show live and I approached it as If I am going to put my name to it, then the very least I can do is leave nothing on the training park. There’s a creative clarity that emerges when you burn the boats and face the sea. And that’s what the Reinvention Summit became: not an event built from excess, but from essence.

Not a product of funding — but of faith.

“In an environment of scarcity, people can become wildly creative.” — Alec Ross

In large organisations (and wealthy countries), the “gold crush” shows up in risky, resource-heavy projects launched far ahead of learning. Teams are told, “Be bold!” but without any time to test assumptions or discover what actually works. They skip the scrappy phase — the uncomfortable but crucial phase where failure is cheap and feedback is gold.

So, what’s the alternative?

Patience. Small bets. Rapid prototypes. Learning loops.

Before we scale, we need to explore. Before we invest, we need to experiment. The best innovation cultures know this. They protect ideas while they’re still ants. They understand that the weight of premature success can be just as fatal as failure.

Gold crushes ants. But the right-sized pebble? That might just be the first step to building an empire.

Join us at The Reinvention Summit Next Week to learn more.

If you are a subscriber and attending please let me know, I have a Goodie bag with a pin from the show. As you have read, I will pack them myself 🙂

https://www.thereinventionsummit.com

The latest in our Gary Hamel Series is live:

https://medium.com/media/ad215facbecbd482914294ff1b92910c/href

Gold Crushes Ants: Why Overfunding Kills Innovation Before It Grows was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.