Babe the Business Pig

We watched George Miller's "Babe" as a family. The same George Miller behind "Mad Max;" this was no dystopia--it was not "Animal Farm" and it was not "Charlotte's Web." But it was rich in allegory and it was not simply cute.

It had been many years since the last time we saw it, long before the kids were born. I know we loved it in the 1990s, but I took new lessons to heart. This is a movie every entrepreneur should watch.

Babe the Pig is kind, but he is not weak. He protects those he cares about with all of the strength he can muster and more bravery than anyone expects.

Farmer Hoggett, his "boss," believes in Babe, but it is not blind belief. He tests out his theories about Babe's value and "skills." He nearly succumbs to fatal doubt, as all entrepreneurs who struggle do. But he is rewarded for ultimately clinging to his tested faith.

And most of the characters either laugh at Babe or laugh at Hoggett. They laugh because they cannot conceive of a world in which either of them succeed. But both Babe and Hoggett respond to the world with a fair amount of stoicism and restraint and do not let outside ridicule derail them from pursuing their goals.

"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, Man and Superman