Tacos vs. Burritos
What Jim Gaffigan, CGI ants, and annual planning cycles can teach us about pairing the right ingredients with the right recipe
And it's all in how you mix the two
And it starts just where the light exists
It’s a feeling that you cannot miss
And it burns a hole through everyone that feels it
- Blue and Yellow, The Used
When times are tough, we tend to focus on what tangibly is missing.
If we just had the right people on the bus…the right processes in place…the right tools to support us.
It’s not that this is wrong - often, an upgrade in people, processes, and tools is needed! - but it’s incomplete. When we conflate the ingredients with the recipe, we risk serving a dish we didn’t want with the ingredients we had to have.
Jim Gaffigan captures this concept perfectly in the clip below.
Mexican food’s great, but it's essentially all the same ingredients, so as a waiter I'd have to deal with these stupid questions, like ‘What is nachos?’ ‘It’s tortilla chips with cheese, meat, or vegetables.’
‘Uh huh… what is a burrito?’
‘Tortilla with cheese, meat, or vegetable.’
‘Then what is a tostada?’
‘Tortilla with cheese, meat, or veg-it's all the same! You say a Spanish word and I'll bring you something!”
The difference between a taco and a burrito comes down to the preparation. There’s nothing wrong with either dish, but if you spend the time gathering ingredients to build a taco and end up with a burrito, you’ll be disappointed1.
The point, then, is to be thoughtful about what the end product looks like before mixing everything!
Let’s look at a few examples to extend this framework beyond food to see how different outcomes can arise from similar elements.
ImportANT decisions
In the fall of 1998, two films were released within six weeks of each other that, on paper, were identical2. Both were computer-generated films. Both featured a worker ant as its protagonist attempting to save his colony and, in the process, falling for a princess. Both came from studios with strong ties to the Walt Disney Company.
Despite their similarities, the reception of the final products differed dramatically.
If you’re looking for a hit movie, it seems closer to a 50/50 chance that an ant-themed film fits the bill. Once you get past the IMDB descriptions, it’s easy to see how each decision impacts the final product.
A few trade-offs stand out:
Timeline - originally slated to hit theaters in March 1999, Dreamworks moved up the release date of Antz five months to get out ahead of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. They succeeded but at a cost to the story-telling. “We knew that we were cranking it out because there was just a general sense of rush,” Antz co-writer Chris Weitz reminisced.
Cast - Antz relied heavily on the star power of its cast (Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Christopher Walken), going so far as to design the characters to resemble the actors. A Bug’s Life approach was to ensure the actors never overshadowed the story, opting for just one Academy Award winner (Kevin Spacey) and filling the rest of the voice cast with comedy stars known for their TV work.
Audience - while both films were marketed as kid movies, Antz was designed to appeal to an older audience. It mirrored the plot of Bananas, a PG-13 Woody Allen film, and relied heavily on satire of foreign policy and class. A Bug’s Life, on the other hand, was more subtle in its cinematic role models, with nods to films like Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, and The Three Amigos.
In short, A Bug’s Life felt lighter than Antz. The team at Pixar knew a hit family film needed to be light on subtext, light on actor focus (not characters, actors!), and light on the development team to nail the story.
This isn’t to say lighter is always better. But, if you went into Antz to see what you expected to be a lighter film and instead got a heavy dose of satire and creepy human-like ants, you’d be disappointed. Expectations matter!
The value of planning
Not all of us are in the movie business, so let’s turn our attention to something most of us are impacted by: annual planning. It’s just one of those things everyone should do…and it matters how you do it.
As described in this post of John Cutler’s The Beautiful Mess3, two teams could follow the same template with vastly different implementation strategies.
Team A writes a 1-pager as part of a heavyweight annual planning process. No 1-pager, no budget. Hurry! Hurry! The leadership team has a hundred 1-pagers to review! Be first in line! What have you got? Does this fall into investment bucket 1 or 2? Hurry!
Team B writes 1-pagers to workshop and shape ideas. They do this all the time, not just when leadership makes an ask. People read carefully and provide thoughtful feedback. The 1-pagers reference stable strategic pillars known across the organization—a strong foundation. The team opts to "pass" on most 1-pagers, but when they do commit, it is with high resolve and excitement. Team B keeps its honest 12-month roadmap up to date and can answer "what would you do with more funding?" at the drop of a dime—anytime. But they do that mostly for themselves. It helps their work.
…
Team A's process is not customer-centric. Imagine a customer peeking in on the annual planning process and seeing all of this performative rushing, writing, and box-checking. What would they think? Team A's leadership team sees this as a necessary evil—"it sucks; that's why we can only do it once a year!" Team A probably views this as "administrative overhead" and jokes that the whole plan will fall apart in two months anyway.
All in all, it's institutionalized mediocrity.
Team B’s process is “just how they work.” It is valuable, not one-sided. It is part of their work culture. They probably don’t even call it process (despite there being sequences of things they do).
It’s not the annual plan that’s critical, but the thought and effort that goes into it. Team A treated it like a task, whereas Team B treated it like a process. The former is lighter in the effort, whereas the latter’s heaviness is what generates the value.
When we treat a process as a necessary ingredient to success - as something binary that we either do or don’t do - we risk incurring all of the cost of the process without adding any of the intended value. When we consider what we want to get out of the process - not just the output, but the thinking refined along the way - how we design the process evolves.
Final Thoughts to Chew On
When we think about the range of outcomes our inputs can deliver, we can reduce the risk that we’ll end up with a taco when we want a burrito.
The critical thing to watch out for is any thinking that resembles “Once we have X, we can deliver Y.” When focusing solely on the missing ingredient, we should remember to question how that piece fits into the broader puzzles we discussed in Subtraction, simply adding something to a system rarely improves it.
Thanks to Roman Eskue for graciously reviewing this post to help me improve it before publishing!
Yes, I know tacos and burritos typically use different-sized tortillas.
The similarities between Antz and A Bug’s Life were likely not a simple coincidence. Jeff Katzenberg, former head of Walt Disney Studios under Michael Eisner, was one of the co-founders of Dreamworks SKG and probably heard the pitch for A Bug’s Life before his departure. If you’re interested, some fascinating stories about this time are documented in Disney War and Creativity, Inc.
Seriously, read John’s work. He has thoughtful pieces on managing teams, priorities, and product strategy.