And Mike, that’s a great anecdote. And, again, at its heart it’s about trust, too. Learning to not only trust other people but to trust your own instincts about other people is key.

Given that quote, I think you’re probably doing pretty well in the realm of ideas.

But I know what you mean. I once was Director of Sofware Development for a children’s software firm. And my slant was simulation-based learning. But the VPs above me saw the market as skill and drill, and the people below me said if you can get them to give us more creative license, we can build games that are technically skill and drill, but have a joy of life in them.

I fought against that in the first game we made, trying to push it into simulation. But I could tell they didn’t get it, or believe it.

What they were passionate about were games that had the love of life that good children’s books had. So I said let’s do it, and they blew me away. Not only did we produce the first Flash-based literacy site ever, but we produced web-based games, in 1999, that still kick the stuffing out of the competition in 2007 (see GameGoo).

Still to this day I’ve never worked with such a talented group of people, so fired up about what they were doing, and so good at achieving their ends. I mean, to do that soup to nuts, the songs, voices, animation, etc. off of game designs that were really little but sketches.

The point is had I held on too firmly to my idea, that would have never happened. And truth be told, I believed in what we were doing when I saw it. I got what they were doing, and it was making the world a better place.

It still does. One of the most moving moments of my life was when my daughter Katie had just turned 4 we were looking for stuff to do on the internet, and I thought why not go check out the old site. So we went there, and she played some of these games I had designed and the team had built. And then for days she was talking about this character named Tina from the game and repeating this “Is it real, or make believe?” line.

I’d built those games when she was 6 months old. At the time my boss had told me they were too simple for a 4 yr. old, that no four-year-old would play a game where the only point was to guess if a story was real or make-believe. My team thought different, and they built an implementation that rocked. And here years later it was my daughter’s favorite game.

So possibly the most genuinely moving moment in a life of educational software, brought about by a software series that on the whole was somewhat opposed to my theoretical take. But what made it great was the team and the people…

Rambling — but maybe that makes sense?

While I have believed all of this to be the case for a long time, I’ve never been able to experience it in my professional life until the past few years. It takes trust, and the right mix of leadership, faith, fun, angst, and endless hope. It also takes the commitment of a team that believes we are doing important work. This mix is rare.

I’m privileged as well to be working in such a mix. I once described us as a “Dream Team.” Now, I think the more appropriate name is “The Perfect Storm.”

It’s a well struck chord that while the tools and toys are neat, its the people that make them interesting. Carry on with those Big Thoughts While Commuting (Have you read Zen of Red Traffic Lights?)

So you’re in good company and you can use this quote at will to subdue any potential objectors