In case you haven’t checked your Twitter feed this week, Cannes is here, and with it the “what does it mean for the future of our industry” questions. (All of which have been asked and answered by every CD, recruiter and holding company exec a half-dozen times already.) So I figured this was the perfect time to take a look at what’s happening outside our business.

Reading a post about Nintendo’s E3 demo of their new 3DS, I wandered down a hyperlink rabbit hole and found myself getting to know Shigeru Miyamoto.

I knew that Miyamoto’s legendary list of credits included Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox and Super Mario Galaxy.  But his back story was new to me – particularly the creation of his first big success: Donkey Kong.

An article at NOWGamer recounts all of the details – so I’m not going to do that – but here are three plot points I found particularly interesting, and how I think they relate to what we’re up to at W+K NY.

1. NINTENDO DIDN’T START AS A VIDEOGAME COMPANY?

“When I started my career at Nintendo, there was no such thing as videogame making at the company,” recalls Miyamoto.

I found out that Nintendo actually started as a playing card company. Then they tried owning taxis and even opened a “Love Hotel” chain. As we hire more and more smart, creative people whose backgrounds and expertise fall far outside of what has long been considered the domain of agencies, it can lead to questions about how they should be integrated into “what we do.” This is a fair question, but also a bit of a trap. The real question is not how we incorporate them into “what we do” but rather - how do we empower these thinkers to the extent that it completely changes “what we do“?

2. FAILURE IS A DAMN GOOD PLACE TO START

In 1980, Nintendo of America placed a large order for a Nintendo game called Radar Scope (these are arcade-era cabinet games we’re talking about). When the US audience found the Space Invaders - style game boring, a panicked NOA CEO asked the Nintendo CEO to fix the game. The assignment fell to Miyamoto, a low-level planner, who, rather than tweak a bad game, created a new game: Donkey Kong - a creative and risky departure from the space shooters that were popular in arcades.

It turns out, nobody asked Miyamoto to create an epic success. They asked him to fix a failure. They didn’t really ask for innovation, but when he gave it to them they rallied around it and figured out how to get it to market (none of the US buyers thought it was going to be a success). It’s a good reminder that failure and a culture that embraces failure (and brilliant people) can produce pretty amazing things – whether that’s Chalkbot

or a video game based on a monkey/plumber/girl love triangle.

3. IT TAKES TWO

Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock sang it. So did Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston. But Miyamoto and Nintendo technician Gunpei Yokoi proved it could result in a coffer of quarters. Miyamoto envisioned a game that couldn’t technically be executed within the industry’s conventions. So Yokoi got to work breaking those conventions and reimagining what could be done from the perspective of a programmer. His solutions forced Miyamoto to evolve his ideas, and the two collaborated like this until they’d created something nobody had ever seen before.

If that’s our goal – creating culture-changing experiences nobody has ever seen before – then truly embracing the tension between technology and creativity is a pretty good place to start. We saw this a few years ago when we were working on PIXAR’s UP. On a tour of PIXAR’s campus someone mentioned how they’d created entirely new software to animate UP because the story couldn’t be told (and the balloons couldn’t be adequately rendered and lit) using existing software. That sort of technical barrier/opportunity existed when PIXAR set out to create the first TOY STORY, and they‘ve just followed the same approach with every movie. Storytellers inspired by advances their programmers have made, programmers inspired to create new technology based on creative vision.

Watching PIXAR’s latest box office success over the weekend, or learning more about the man behind two billionaire plumbers – it became really clear (to me anyway) that the good stuff doesn’t happen when you‘re busy predicting the future; the good stuff happens when your working to invent it.