The Innovation Show

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw

Imagine you’ve washed ashore on a distant, unknown island. You’re immediately faced with a local tribe whose intentions are unclear. Your next move could be the difference between life and death. Vadim Zeland offers three possibilities:

• You could become a victim, pleading for your life?
• You fight for your life, wielding aggression as your only language?
• Or perhaps there’s a third path, few of us would consider, an unreasonable one?

What if you projected unshakeable authority. What if you projected yourself not as a mere leader, but as a figure of unquestionable power, perhaps even as a deity? Such an audacious stance is often dismissed as wholly unreasonable. Yet it is precisely this kind of strategic ambition that drives meaningful change and innovation. It is not about what currently exists but about stretching towards what could exist.

Strategic ambition is deliberately unreasonable. It’s not about targets and timelines. It is about crafting visions that inspire, energise, and demand commitment from those around you. As Gary Hamel eloquently puts it: “No organisation outperforms its aspirations.” Before we look at examples from the business world, consider the following from the movie world.

James Cameron, Liquid Metal, and the Power of Unreasonable Ambition

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”― James Cameron

James Cameron, the visionary director behind groundbreaking films like Terminator, Titanic, Avatar and The Abyss, embodies the principle of unreasonable ambition. Cameron had an ambitious vision for the original Terminator: a machine so technologically advanced it seemed impossible at the time. His original script included two Terminators but he had to scrap that idea due to technological and budgetary restrictions. Despite a modest budget of just six million dollars, Cameron challenged his team to deliver visuals and effects that pushed well beyond contemporary technological limits. They did push every boundary possible, but the technology simply wasn’t ready.

Undeterred, Cameron pressed forward with his next project. When creating The Abyss, recent advancements in special effects now allowed him to depict a liquid-like, underwater alien — something previously inconceivable.

By the time he returned with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron was finally able to realise the spectacular imagery he originally envisioned for The Terminator. The iconic liquid-metal T-1000 became a visual landmark, helping propel the film to massive box office success. During the making of Terminator 2, Cameron recalls vividly how his team stretched far beyond what was deemed possible:

“We knew we were stretching limits because we could feel the tearing sensation that goes with that stretching. We were really feeling the stress of trying to push beyond things we’d done before. Sometimes you tend to overreach and realise you can’t do it much better than before, because you were already pushing at a hundred percent. But fortunately, I was working with really good people, and we were able to go beyond.”

Cameron’s leadership wasn’t about pushing people past breaking points; it was about fostering a creative tension, presenting seemingly impossible challenges that inspired his team to innovate. As he described, his visual effects collaborators initially doubted their ability to achieve certain effects, like the T-1000 seamlessly walking through bars:

“They said before they started the film, they didn’t know if they could do the shots. I asked, ‘What does that mean? Are we going to find out in six months?’ They responded, ‘We’ll talk about it for a few weeks, we’ll look at our software, we’ll think of ways to solve it.’ And it became a give-and-take. They’d come back and say, ‘If you don’t move the camera on this shot, we think we can do it.’ I was pushing them.”

This spirit of collaborative ambition, of reaching just beyond current technological frontiers, exemplifies what our guest on The Innovation Show Gary Hamel calls Strategic Intent. When discussing Cameron’s journey with Gary on The Innovation Show, I highlighted how Cameron’s strategic intent drove him and his team right to the edge of their capabilities — and then compelled them to build new ones. Eventually, the market shifted, technology evolved, and Cameron’s original vision was unlocked.

Reflecting on this, Gary noted:

“Everybody needs that ambitious idea somewhere in the back of their head — the thought that says, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…?’ Cameron had this clear vision of what he wanted to communicate, what he wanted on the screen. Initially, the technology couldn’t support it. But that’s precisely how you create the future. So many of us become captive to what currently is, and we struggle to imagine what could be. We’re constantly told something’s impossible or unfeasible. Yet that ambition to dream beyond today’s limits is essential.”

Organisational ADD

“Most organisations have ADD — Ambition Deficit Disorder.” — Gary Hamel

A recurrent theme across our multiple-part series, is what Gary laments to be a pervasiveness of Organisational ADD. HE emphasises that true ambition must ignite a profound willingness to sacrifice; it must be worthy, compelling, and noble. In his work, he often cites powerful examples of bold strategic ambition, such as that of CEMEX. The Mexican cement giant’s strategic purpose transcended mere profit and the mundane production of bags of grey powder. Instead, the company was driven by a higher vision: enabling affordable housing for those who needed it most — a truly noble cause. Similarly, Charles Schwab’s daring leap into online banking wasn’t about chasing digital trends, but a deeply held aspiration to become “guardians of customers’ financial lives.” Such strategic ambitions offer moral clarity, galvanise employees, enable organisations to outpace traditional rivals, and set new industry benchmarks.

Yet despite these luminous examples, organisational timidity still prevails. Hamel and his late collaborator C.K. Prahalad consistently warned against the temptation of “paring down ambitions” merely to align with comfortable, existing resources. While modest ambitions seem safe and achievable, they invariably leave enormous potential untapped. Instead, Hamel advocates deliberately creating what he calls a “purposeful misfit” — an intentional gap between current capabilities and future aspirations. This gap becomes your organisation’s strategic ambition, an arena where scarcity of resources fuels creativity, innovation, and resilience. It is precisely within this chasm between today’s reality and tomorrow’s potential that ingenuity flourishes, enabling the development of new capabilities for your next ambitious leap.

Week’s Anything But Weak Ambition

Former Chief Technologist at Corning, Waguih Ishak shared how Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning Incorporated, epitomises this philosophy of strategic stretch and unreasonable ambition. Weeks is famously relentless in challenging his teams to surpass their self-imposed boundaries. Recently, when a Corning engineer proudly proposed a brilliant improvement that would boost technology efficiency by 25 percent, Weeks responded provocatively: “Why not 50 percent?”

The engineer initially balked, stunned by the sheer audacity of the question. Yet, just like we saw with James Cameron, such seemingly unrealistic challenges force us — and our teams — to consider radical possibilities we may have previously dismissed as impossible. Weeks knows that true breakthroughs rarely emerge from cautious incrementalism; they spring from seemingly unreasonable challenges.

In a 2015, Keynote, Weeks elaborates on his leadership philosophy:

“I’m a capitalist. I believe capitalism is the best tool to allocate resources and drive progress efficiently. But we can continue to evolve and improve that tool to create more paths to success. Metrics emphasising near-term results were developed when capital was scarce; today, we’re awash in capital. We must create a balanced approach between near-term payoffs and long-term investment. Leaders need to continually ask challenging questions: What is our unique contribution to the world? How can we be the best at what we do? How do we focus equally on managing scarce talent as on managing plentiful capital? How do we continually create better versions of ourselves?”

Supporting this viewpoint, former CTO, Waguih Ishak emphasises that organisations must deliberately encourage “unreasonable” thinking. During a scenario-planning exercise, a respected Corning scientist provocatively asked: “What if a competitor developed a method to deposit magnetic films on glass without high temperatures?” — directly challenging one of Corning’s core, industry-leading capabilities. Initially, the room responded with scepticism and laughter. Yet, this seemingly impractical scenario soon sparked profound strategic discussions about innovation readiness and managing competitive threats. While finding executive time for such exercises is often challenging, Ishak highlights that scenario-planning activities not only rehearse the possible but also stretch the organisational mindset — unlocking new thinking that can transform how we approach the present.

Ultimately, strategic ambition is less about immediate feasibility and more about stretching our thinking to explore new opportunities. We must continuously ask ourselves and our organisations:

• Are we truly stretching our ambition beyond what currently seems achievable?
• Are we creating environments where unreasonable questions are welcomed rather than ridiculed?
• Are we managing talent and ingenuity as deliberately as we manage expenditure?

Only by daring to ask “Why not?” instead of “Can we?” can we achieve meaningful progress and innovation. Ambition shouldn’t simply match the limits of today; it must seek to redefine the limits of tomorrow.

Find latest episode of The Gary Hamel Series on “Strategic Intent” below.

In a few days, we welcome Joseph L. Bower, who inspired Gary and so many others with his theory of The Resource Allocation Process.

https://medium.com/media/e3330b3df75ac3059294e90c2c6e7476/href

Unreasonable Ambition: The Engine of Progress was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.