The Idea Person waltzes into the office on a Monday morning feeling light as a feather, her mind blooming like a lotus flower. An idea is unfurling! And what a marvelous idea it is, shimmering with promise, twinkling with the anticipation of what could be. Though the idea at this stage is barely a ghost, Idea Person can already see, taste, or touch some piece of it—a flawless sentence, a scene that brings a lump to the throat, a striking concept, an intuitive interaction. This idea has legs! And what is needed is for those legs to grow strong, stand up, and sprint forward until they shatter the barrier between imagination and reality.

So Idea Person gathers her talented team, tells them the idea, and says “make it so!” Then this team—talented and diligent as they are—takes the idea into their laboratory, pumps up the bass while they spin some magic, and voila! the idea, like Casper, gains a beautiful earthly body. The world is made better off with this new story, movie, invention, design, product, service, law, process—whatever the idea is.

Everybody is terribly impressed and thinks, “Wow, what a great idea that Idea Person thought of.”

Idea Person, pleased as pie, decides to take a vacation to some far-flung locale in search of inspiration for the Next Big Idea.