Ideas for Impact
Happiness is not how much time you spend doing what you love, but how little time you spend doing what you hate.
As in Charlie Munger’s recipe for success: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And “I know I’ll perform better if I run my nose in my own stupid mistakes.”
Idea for Impact: The road less stupid can keep you from silly errors, if not all errors.
In the ’90s, Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, through its subsidy Hitachi-Omron Terminal Solutions, introduced the Clean ATM, which cleaned the bank notes during transactions. The Baltimore Sun (11-Dec-1996) notes,
Hitachi has turned its talents to money-laundering of a literal kind, with an automated teller machine that sterilizes and irons yen notes before dispensing them.
Hitachi did not set out to sanitize the money; its engineers were trying to solve the problem of crumpled bills, which tended to jam machines, a company spokesman says. They solved the problem by running the bills through rollers heated to 392 degrees [Fahrenheit, 200 degrees Celsius]—any hotter would singe paper money—and discovered that the process also killed bacteria.
Idea for Impact: Serendipity is central to the creative process. Many ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Always be ready to discover what you’re not looking for.
No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can evolve into a helpful innovation. I’ve previously drawn attention to this aspect of the creative process in my 3M Post-it Note case study.
Another notable example of what transforms ideas into innovation is the “discovery” of penicillin and its curative effect on infectious diseases.
The Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. More specifically, Fleming found that a specific mold produced penicillin. This substance was previously known to inhibit the growth of bacteria.
In 1928, Fleming was working on cultures of Staphylococcus, a bacterium that induces blood poisoning. Upon returning from a vacation, he saw a discarded Petri dish that he had left behind without sterilizing. It had a zone around an invading fungus where his bacterium culture didn’t grow. A mold spore from another lab in Fleming’s building had unexpectedly fallen on one of his cultures. The spore had spread over the Petri dish while Fleming was away. Instead of throwing the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as Penicillium chrysogenum, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.
Fleming suggested his discovery might be used as an antiseptic in wounds. He published an account of this work in 1929. However, he couldn’t find a way of extracting enough penicillin needed to be curative enough without it becoming ineffective.
In itself, Fleming’s discovery was thus not a substantial leap in terms of penicillin’s use as a pharmaceutical. After Fleming’s discovery, penicillin proved unstable and difficult to produce in pure form for almost a decade. It took two Oxford University scientists, Sir Howard Walter Florey and Dr. Ernst Boris Chain, to realize its full potential only in the 1940s. They showed how to prepare penicillin in usable form and demonstrated that it could be favorably applied to the treatment of disease.
From the time when its medical application was established, penicillin has saved millions of lives by stopping the growth of the bacteria responsible for poisoning the blood and causing many once-fatal diseases. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine to recognize their complementary achievements.
Idea for Impact: Often, there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the original creator can’t bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to others who can evaluate and trial the discovery in new contexts.
In other words, the creative process doesn’t end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications.
Consider a woman who complained that her neighborhood dry cleaner ruined her expensive slacks. “Last month, he spoiled my wool blazer. Last Christmas, he … . It always happens,” she grumbled.
This woman knew she was taking chances with this dry cleaner. She allowed it to happen.
Luck is sometimes the result of taking appropriate action. And, bad luck is sometimes the result of tempting fate.
Say, you’ve been planning for weeks for your next big trip. You got an incredible deal on the day’s very last flight to your destination. On the day of departure, your late-night flight gets canceled. Sure, you’re a victim of back luck—but you invited it. Think about it. Odds are, you’re more likely to have a flight delay or cancellation later in the day because airlines schedule their rosters tightly to maximize aircraft and flight crew utilization. Delays and disruptions from earlier in the day propagate onward to the late flights.
Often, luck has nothing to do with bad luck. “The fault,” as Shakespeare wrote, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. Don’t self-sabotage yourself by tempting fate.
You have to be lucky to get lucky. You have no control over many outcomes in life, but you can always increase the odds of getting lucky by taking appropriate action. More importantly, you can minimize the chance of bad luck by decreasing its odds.
Remember, a good mathematics student never buys a lottery ticket, and if he does, he never grumbles about not winning the jackpot!
Corn flakes were born (1894) when the Kellogg brothers inadvertently left a pot of boiled wheat overnight on a stove. They passed the flaky dough through bread rollers and baked the flakes to create a crunchy snack.
The Penicillin mold was discovered (1928) by Sir Alexander Fleming, who, upon returning from a vacation, saw a Petri dish that he had left behind without disinfecting. That Petri dish had a zone around an invading fungus where his Staphylococcus bacterium culture had not grown. A mold spore from another lab in the building had accidentally fallen on this culture. The spore had grown while Fleming was away. Rather than throw the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as belonging to the Penicillium genus, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.
The microwave oven was invented (1945) unintentionally during an experiment by Percy Spencer of Raytheon Corporation. Electromagnetic waves from a new vacuum tube melted a chocolate bar in his pocket while standing next to a magnetron.
Viagra had been developed (1989) as the chemical compound sildenafil citrate to treat hypertension and angina pectoris. Researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials that the compound was good for something else. It was approved for medical use in 1998.
Serendipity is a rich idea that is very central to the creative process. Lots of ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Physiologist Julius H. Comroe Jr. once said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”
Idea for Impact: Creativity is a disorderly journey. Much of the time, you may never get where you’re going. You may never find what you hope to find. Yet still, you must stay open to the new and the unexpected.
Explore how to transform serendipitous ‘mistakes’ into breakthroughs.
Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:
I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.
People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.
Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.
If you’re an entrepreneur entering a new market with a product or service that nobody else offers, you’ll seek the first-mover advantage.
Alas, many first-mover advantages are not sustainable, and many first-movers are as successful as what the superstars will have you believe.
New ventures have higher failure rates than more established businesses.
Creating market awareness, sustaining market acceptance, fending away aggressive competitors are often easier said than done for many new ventures, not to mention lining up suppliers and distributors. Besides, unless you’re well-capitalized by patient investors, you’re likely to face higher-than-foreseen marketing costs on top of lower-than-anticipated sales.
Instead, if you are the second—or later—entrepreneur to market, you’ll stand a better chance of success by learning from the forerunner’s mistakes. You’ll also earn better credence from your customers, suppliers, distributors, employees, and investors to help create a better product or service.
Idea for Impact: There’s an American adage that “many pioneers died with arrows in their backs.” The best time for an entrepreneur to offer a new product or service is after others have already gotten there and laid some groundwork.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate how much of life is the product of chance—that invisible hand of life: when and where you were born, the age you live in, people you meet, the problems and opportunities you face, how you meet your spouse, and so forth.
Much of these are largely outside of your control.
In this context, it’s interesting to think about how some people are born with a pair of aces, never realize it, and squander opportunities handed down to them. As the great philosophers (and Singapore’s Founding Father Lee Kuan Yew) have advised, life is what you make of the cards you’re dealt with—using some talent, courage, and wisdom.
But often, stuff just happens. Some things are simply beyond your control—you can only do your best by focusing on your effort and lowering your expectations of the outcomes of much of what you’ll do in life.
The Gambler’s Fallacy is the misleading belief that the probability of a specific occurrence in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events—that its probability will increase with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur.
Suppose that you roll a fair die 14 times and don’t get a six even once. According to the Gambler’s Fallacy, a six is “long overdue.” Thus, it must be a good wager for the 15th roll of the dice. This conjecture is irrational; the probability of a six is the same as for every other roll of the dice: that is, 1/6.
In practical terms, the Gambler’s Fallacy is the hunch that if you play long enough, you will eventually win. For example, if you toss a fair coin and flip heads five times in a row, the Gambler’s Fallacy suggests that the next toss may well flip a tail because it is “due.” In actuality, the results of previous coin flips have no bearing on future coin flips. Therefore, it is poor reasoning to assume that the probability of flipping tails on the next coin-toss is better than one-half.
A classic example of the Gambler’s Fallacy is when parents who’ve had children of the same sex anticipate that their next child ought to be of the opposite sex. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was the first to document the Gambler’s Fallacy. In Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1796,) Laplace identified an instance of expectant fathers trying to predict the probability of having sons. These men assumed that the ratio of boys to girls born must be fifty-fifty. If adjacent villages had high male birth rates in the recent past, they could predict more birth of girls in their own village.
The Gambler’s Fallacy is what makes gambling so addictive. Gamblers normally think that gambling is an intrinsically fair-minded system in which any losses they’ll incur will eventually be corrected by a winning streak.
In buying lottery tickets, as in gambling, perseverance will not pay. However, human nature is such that gamblers have an irrational hunch that if they keep playing, they will eventually win, even if the odds of winning a lottery are remote. However, the odds of winning the jackpot remain unchanged … every time people buy lottery tickets. Playing week after week doesn’t change their chances. What’s more, the odds remain the same even for people who have previously won the lottery.
The Gambler’s Fallacy is also called the Monte Carlo Fallacy because of an extraordinary event that happened in the renowned Monte Carlo Casino in the Principality of Monaco.
On 18-August-1913, black fell 26 times in a row at a roulette table. Seeing that that the roulette ball had fallen on black for quite some time, gamblers kept pushing more money onto the table assuming that, after the sequence of blacks, a red was “due” at each subsequent spin of the roulette wheel. The sequence of blacks that occurred that night is an unusual statistical occurrence, but it is still among the possibilities, as is any other sequence of red or black. As you may guess, gamblers at that roulette table lost millions of francs that night.
The Gambler’s Fallacy is frequently in force in casual judgments, casinos, sporting events, and, alas, in everyday business and personal decision-making. This common fallacy is manifest by the belief that a random event is more likely to occur because it has not happened for a time (or a random event is less likely to occur because it recently happened.)
In soccer / football, kickers and goalkeepers are frequently prone to the Gambler’s Fallacy during penalty shootouts. For instance, after a series of three kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers are more likely to dive in the opposite direction at the fourth kick.Don’t be misled by the Gambler’s Fallacy. Be aware of the certainty of statistical independence. The occurrence of one random event has no statistical bearing upon the occurrence of the other random event. In other words, the probability of the occurrence of a random event is never influenced by a previous, or series of previous, arbitrary events.
Idea for Impact: Be skeptical of most judgments about probabilities. Never rely exclusively on your intuitive sense in evaluating probable events. In general, relying exclusively on your gut feeling or your hunches in assessing probabilities is usually not a reason to trust the assessment, but to distrust it.
Problem finding is one of the most significant parts of problem solving. However, it tends to be an underappreciated skill. Many managers naively consider it strange to encourage employees to look for problems at work: “Why look for new problems when we’ve got no resources to work on ones we’ve already identified?”
Many courses and books on problem solving and creativity overlook problem finding. Many educational resources tend to assume that problem solving really begins only after problems have been identified.
The story of the invention of the ballpoint pen demonstrates the importance of problem finding. Had the inventors not recognized a problem with the existing writing instruments of their day, they would not have developed their invention.
In the 1920s, Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro spent much time proofreading and checking for errors in others’ writings. To communicate these errors to the authors, Laszlo could not use pencils because their impressions fade quickly. He tried using a fountain pen, but the ink from the fountain pen dried slowly and often left smudges on paper.
Laszlo observed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and left the paper smudge-free. When he tried using that ink in his fountain pen, however, the ink was too viscous to flow into the tip of the fountain pen.
Laszlo then collaborated with his chemist-brother Gyorgy Biro to invent a new pen tip consisting of a ball that was enclosed within a socket. As the ball rolled inside the socket, the ball could pick up ink from a reservoir or cartridge and then continue to roll to deposit the ink on the paper. The Biro brothers thus invented the ballpoint pen. The company they created is now part of the BIC Company. The ballpoint pen continues to be called a ‘Biro’ in some countries.
Greek Philosopher Plato famously wrote in The Republic, “Let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention.”
One reason we fail to identify problems is that we do not stop to think about improving various situations that we encounter. Very often, these problems are directly in front of us; we need to consciously identify them and convert them into opportunities for problem solving. Instead, we tend to take inconveniences and unpleasant situations for granted and assume they are merely “facts of life.”
It pays to keep your eyes open and look at inconveniences, difficulties, and troubles as creative problems to be solved. Don’t ignore these merely as facts of life.
Curiosity, intrigue, and motivation influence problem finding (and problem solving.) One of the easiest ways to develop your skills in problem finding is to ponder at anything around you and wonder why those gadgets and contraptions were ever invented. Analyze carefully and you’ll learn that the first step taken by the inventors of these objects was the identification of the problems the objects were designed to solve.
When you look around various objects in your life, think about what life was before these objects were invented. What problems could these inventions have solved? Why was the zipper invented? What problems motivated Bjarne Stroustrup to create C++? What was internet search like before Google? How did commerce transpire before the advent of coins and bills and money?
Some people make a career out of problem finding. Managers who want to know if their organizations are running efficiently frequently hire consultants to look for problems that managers do not know exist in their businesses.
And finally, if you want to become an inventor or an entrepreneur, try to start with problems you already have in your work or in your life. Ideally, identify problems shared by a large number of people to increase the probability that your inventions will be put in widespread use.
Idea for Impact: A creative solution to a problem often depends on first finding and defining a creative problem. Very often, the solution to a problem becomes obvious when the problem has been properly identified, defined, and represented.