Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Problem Solving

Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For

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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.

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The #1 Thing Top Salespeople Do

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It is astonishing how many salespeople aim for nothing and hit it every time.

Average salespeople often don’t have a written “game plan” for every sales call. They may have only a vague idea of how to go about their sales call. They usually wing it and hope for the best. They fail to plan and thus plan to fail.

Planning a sales call is vital because it gives you a framework to understand your customer’s buying motivations. You can have “value summaries” at hand to evoke her interest.

  • Establish the call objectives. What do you want to accomplish? Review your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, meeting notes, or whatever method you use to manage interactions with customers. Reexamine what was discussed the last time you met with the customer. What are her pain points? What might she need that she’s not asking for?
  • Develop a list of questions you’re going to ask. These questions should guide the “needs analysis” phase of the sales process—they shape her buying criteria. Being ready with prepared questions help minimize the amount of close-ended questions you’ll ask your customer.
  • Review what you can “value add” to your customers to incentivize getting more business from them. A “value add” could be anything from extending warranties, training staff, selling pre-assembled products, customizing products, providing financing, etc.
  • Think through what resistance you may anticipate. List possible objections that could stall a sale: bad timing, budgetary constraints, new leadership, market uncertainty, etc. Develop a go-to response for each challenge. Ask yourself, “How can I help the customer get past this resistance?”

Planning a sales call helps you get in the shoes of the person you’re trying to sell to and sell it from their perspective.

Idea for Impact: Always have a plan for a sales call. No matter how rushed you are, how well you know a customer, or how routine the call might be, plan the call. Never wing it. Great brands aren’t measured by units sold but relationships built.

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Choosing Your Leadership Style: Detail-Orientation

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As Amazon’s Andy Jassy takes over the reins from Jeff Bezos, the Wall Street Journal has a profile of Jassy’s ultra-detail-oriented management style:

Former colleagues say Mr. Jassy would spend enormous amounts of time on the narrowest of details if he thought it was important. … When an AWS data center in Virginia was hit by a major outage, Mr. Jassy personally got involved in figuring out the problem. It turned out a technician had been checking a generator and the door accidentally bumped into a switch, shutting it off. Mr. Jassy dug into the incident and pressed the team to redesign the generators. When the CEO is digging at that level, everyone at the company starts to dig at the same level.

Flexibility and a detail-oriented mindset are leadership qualities that Jassy shares with Bezos. As at many founder-led firms, Amazon’s corporate culture has mimicked these traits, and the colossus has historically been able to jump on opportunities quickly and quality-control its organizational capabilities.

Idea for Impact: A fundamental duty of leadership is to guide an organization’s collective awareness. Attention to detail (without micromanagement) matters. When leaders don’t really care about the details and are content to produce low-quality work, their teams will start to do, too.

In areas where influential leaders aren’t detail-focused, they have somebody on their teams that does. Apple’s Steve Jobs famously focused on creativity and innovation while relying on Tim Cook and his tight-knit team of operations executives to run Apple’s operations.

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Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

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Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not 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. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

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This Hack Will Help You Think Opportunity Costs

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Making decisions is all about opportunity costs. For instance, every time you spend money to get something, you should ask yourself what else, perhaps of better value, you could get with that money—now or later.

The problem is, when forced to choose between something immediate and concrete and something else that’s comparatively abstract and distant, the opportunity cost could lack clarity.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely proposes the notion of “anti-goals” to help examine the trade-offs you’re forced to make. Ariely encourages pairing goals such that if you satisfy one, you’ll impede the other. For example, when choosing to spend $100 on an evening out today, you can consider a tangible anti-goal—say, saving for the family’s summer vacation—that’ll be held back.

Idea for Impact: Thinking about what you want to avoid—the anti-goal—is a potent tool. It allows you to focus on things that really matter.

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Tylenol Made a Hero of Johnson & Johnson: A Timeless Crisis Management Case Study

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Crisis needn’t strike a company solely because of its own neglect or disaster. Sometimes, situations emerge where the company can’t be blamed—but the company realizes quickly that it’ll get much blame if it fumbles the ball in its crisis-response.

Ever since cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol killed seven people in Chicago in 1982, corporate boards and business school students have studied the response of Johnson & Johnson (J&J,) Tylenol’s manufacturer, to learn how to handle crises. The culprits are still unknown almost 40 years later.

Successful Crisis Management: Full Responsibility, Proactive Stance

In 1982, Tylenol commanded 35 percent of the over-the-counter analgesic market in America. This over-the-counter painkiller was the drugmaker’s best-selling product, and it represented nearly 17 percent of J&J’s profits. When seven people died from consuming the tainted drug, Time magazine wrote of the tragedy’s victims,

Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village took Extra-Strength Tylenol to ward off a cold that had been dogging her. Mary Reiner, 27… had recently given birth to her fourth child. Paula Prince, 35, a United Airlines stewardess, was found dead in her Chicago apartment, an open bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol nearby in the bathroom. Says Dr. Kim [the chief of critical care at Northwest Community Hospital]: “The victims never had a chance. Death was certain within minutes.”

A panic ensued about how widespread the contamination may be. Moreover, Americans started to question the safety of over-the-counter medications.

Advertising guru Jerry Della Femina declared Tylenol dead:

I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name. There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and if they find him, I want to hire him because then I want him to turn our water cooler into a wine cooler.

The ‘Grand-Daddy’ of Good Crisis Response

  • J&J acted quickly, with complete candidness about what had happened, and immediately sought to remove any source of danger based on the worst-case scenario. Within hours of learning of the deaths, J&J installed toll-free numbers for consumers to get information, sent alerts to healthcare providers nationwide, and stopped advertising the product. J&J recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves and offered replacement products free of charge in the safer tablet form. J&J did not wait for evidence to see whether the contamination might be more widespread.
  • J&J’s leadership was in the lead and seemed in full control throughout the crisis. James Burke, J&J’s chairman, was widely admired for his leadership to pull Tylenol capsules off the market and his forthrightness in dealing with the media. (The Tylenol crisis led the news every night on every station for six weeks.)
  • J&J placed consumers first. J&J spent more than $100 million for the recall and relaunch of Tylenol. The stock had been trading near a 52-week high just before the tragedy, dropped for a time, but recovered to its highs only two months later.
  • J&J accepted responsibility. Burke could have described the disaster in many different ways: as an assault on the company, as a problem somewhere in the process of getting Tylenol from J&J factories to retail stores, or as the acts of a crazed criminal.
  • J&J sought to ensure that measures were taken to prevent as far as possible a recurrence of the problem. J&J introduced tamper-proof packaging (supported by an expanded media campaign) that would make it much more difficult for a similar incident to occur in the future.
  • J&J presented itself prepared to handle the short-term damage in the name of consumer safety. That, more than anything else, established a basis for trust with their customers. Within a year of the disaster, J&J’s share of the analgesic market, which had fallen to 7 percent from 37 percent following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30 percent.

Business Principles Should Hold True in Good Times and Bad

When the second outbreak of poisoning occurred four years after the first, Burke went on national television to declare that J&J would only offer Tylenol in caplets, which could not be pulled apart and resealed without consumers knowing about it.

Burke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. He was named one of history’s ten most outstanding CEOs by Fortune magazine in 2003. In Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times (2004,) Burke emphasized,

J&J credo has always stated that the company is responsible first to its customers, then to its employees, the community and the stockholders, in that order. The credo is all about the consumer. [When those seven deaths occurred,] the credo made it very clear at that point exactly what we were all about. It gave me the ammunition I needed to persuade shareholders and others to spend the $100 million on the recall. The credo helped sell it.

Trust has been an operative word in my life. It embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business.

Idea for Impact: A Crisis Makes a Leader

The first few days after any disaster or crisis can be a make-or-break time for a company’s and its leaders’ reputation. The urgency experienced during a crisis often gives leaders the go-ahead to enact change faster than ever before.

Admittedly, the Tylenol case study is more clear-cut than most crises because, from the get-go, it is clearly evident that criminals, not Johnson & Johnson, were responsible for the poisoning and the withdrawal of Tylenol from stores was comparatively easier to execute.

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The Data Never “Says”

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Data doesn’t say anything. Indeed, data can’t say anything for itself about an issue any more than a saw can form furniture, or a sauce can simmer a stew.

Data is inert and inanimate. Data doesn’t know why it was created. Data doesn’t have a mind of its own, and, therefore, it can’t infer anything.

Data is a necessary ingredient in judgment. It’s people who select and interpret data. People can turn it into insight or torture it to bring their agenda to bear. Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the people wielding it.

Far more than we admit, subjectivity and intuition play a significant role in deciding how we collect, choose, process, explain, interpret, and apply the data. As entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan warns in Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (2012,) “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs.”

In the hands of careless users, data can end up having the opposite effect its creators intended. All data is good or bad depending on how it’s employed in a compelling story and what end it’s serving—neither of which the data itself can control.

  • Don’t let data drive your conclusions. Let data inform your conclusions.
  • Don’t declare, “The data says,” (as in, “the stock market thinks.”) Data by itself cannot have a particular interpretation.
  • When you find data that seems to support the case you wish to make, don’t swoop on it without caution and suspicion. Data can be very deceptive when used carelessly.
  • Be familiar with the limitations of your data. Investigate if your data informs any other equally valid hypothesis that could propose an alternative conclusion.

Idea for Impact: Beware of the risk of invoking data in ways that end up undermining your message.

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Leadership is Being Visible at Times of Crises

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It’s terrible optics for an elected official to leave his constituency while it’s in the midst of a crisis.

In a grave slip-up for an ambitious politician, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s giving a lame excuse initially for his Cancún joint made him look insensitive. He was expected to stay and endure alongside his constituents, who were suffering from Texas’s recent freezing temperatures and blackouts.

Of course, Cruz didn’t do anything that hurt anybody, apart from drawing police resources away to shepherd him through the airport. Cruz’s argument—sensible in its own way—was that all he could do was be in regular communication with state and local officials who’re spearheading the crisis response. After all, Cruz has no formal power in the state administration.

As a comparison, King George and the Queen Mother declined to leave London as bombs shattered their city during World War II. As an expression of concern, and commitment to the Allied cause, they even visited sites destroyed during The Blitz of 1940.

Idea for Impact: Leadership means serving as an anchor during crisis times and being available, connected, and accessible during a crisis. Leaders can’t do everything, and they need to delegate responsibilities. However, entrustment should not entail emotional detachment.

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The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity

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When most folks encounter a problem, an inconvenience, or an unpleasant situation, they’ll assume these problems are “facts of life” and go on with their lives. At the most, they may even lament about it to others.

Not attentive entrepreneurs. They tend to identify problems and construe them as opportunities.

Serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal tells the story of how she started WILD, New York City’s first gluten-free pizzeria, after becoming increasingly intolerant to processed foods:

It all started in 2005 when I started having recurring stomachaches. I realized I was intolerant to all of the additives, hormones, and pesticides that were being put in American mass-produced food. At the time, I had given up my favorite comfort food, pizza. In 2006, I opened WILD in New York City to offer people the best version of a pizza: made with organic, gluten-free flours & tomato sauces, and hormone-free cheeses & meats.

During that time, everyone thought “gluten-free,” “farm-to-table,” and “organic” meant “must taste like cardboard,” so it took a lot of education to get people to “get” it.

Embedded in Agrawal’s narrative is a great entrepreneurial thought lesson: You, too, can become better at recognizing unrevealed opportunities by learning to spot the subtle clues all around. The key question to ask is, “This product should already exist, why doesn’t it?”

Learn to Spot Hidden Business Opportunities

Besides WILD, Agrawal has applied the same ingenuity to found two other successsful businesses called THINX underwear and TUSHY bidet accessories.

Answer the following questions to check if some problem you’re aware of serves as a business idea worth exploring:

  • What’s appalling in your personal or professional world?
  • Is this thing so terrible that you want to do something about it?
  • Does this bother any person but you just as much?
  • Your proposed solution should already exist, but why doesn’t it?
  • Could this solution be worth something for others who are dealing with similar problems?

Idea for Impact: “Fix-What-Sucks” Business Opportunities are Everywhere

All you have to do is look around your own life and find something that has been broken, and then fix it. Extend and expand. The world is always seeking better, faster, cheaper, and smarter ways to solve its problems.

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What the Duck!

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There’s a popular technique among programmers called “rubber duck debugging:” put a rubber duck (or a cardboard cutout of a dog) next to your computer, and whenever you get stuck, you talk to the duck.

Yes, you talk your problem and walk your code with that inanimate object. And you perpetuate the stereotype that we geeks are a socially awkward bunch.

“Showing It to Someone Else” isn’t just a way of telling the other what you think; it’s a way of telling yourself what you think. Just the act of slowing down and explaining your problem and its context can bring about a moment of illumination.

Rubber duck debugging is related to what psychologists call “incubation.” The best solutions can strike suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your problem. Think of Archimedes and his Eureka moment.

Idea for Impact: Talking is often a part of thought. After many failed attempts, switching your brain from problem-solving to problem-explaining—even to a cat, parent, sympathetic coworker, or somebody who may not know much about whatever it is that’s bothering you—can break you free from fixation and trigger creative breakthroughs.

Hat tip to reader Nick Ashcroft.

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