May 22, 2013
When a Bangladesh Economics Professor saw his country experience massive starvation, he dreamed of using his skills to improve the world. “I started to dread my own lectures. What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?”[1] Professor Muhammad Yunus went to nearby villages to meet people to truly understand their environment, challenges and dreams. Yunus discovered village women paying loan shark rates for bamboo to make bamboo furniture because banks thought the loans were too risky and too small. Yunus lent $27 (US) of his money to 42 women who eventually repaid these loans generating a $.80 profit for Yunus. This is how micro-lending was discovered leading to the creation of the Grameen Bank. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Yunus’ believed that no matter what is the education level of the individual, each person is resourceful enough to be creative and entrepreneurial. If you give them the money, rather than demonstrating faith by entrusting them with a loan, the inner spirit and pride is never stimulated [...]
May 9, 2013
Aspirer Insight. It is hard to imagine today a seventeen year old boy putting on a business suit, grabbing his father’s briefcase and successfully walking past security guards with a confident wave. In an action befitting Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can, the brazen trespasser added his name to the building directory once inside. He even made plastic name titles for the unoccupied office, room 23C. What would inspire this aspiring film maker to breach Universal Pictures studios and put “Steven Spielberg, Room 23C” on the door? As a young boy, Steven’s passion was shooting homemade movies with an 8 mm camera. He would film wrecks of his Lionel train. He collected small admission fees from his viewing friends. A dream, big Idea or Breakthrough Innovation cannot happen without an Aspirer or multiple Aspirers. During a visit with cousins, the seventeen year old had his first brush with his dream. Steven and his cousins went on the Universal Studio tour. During a tram stop for a bathroom break, Steven wandered away to watch some filming. A man named Chuck Silvers asked him what he was doing there. Steven began sharing his lifelong passion which engaged Chuck into an [...]
April 24, 2013
Pamela loved PEZ candy and collecting PEZ dispensers. One night while having dinner with her boyfriend, she shared her frustration. She told him it was very hard to find other PEZ collectors in San Francisco to trade with. Her boyfriend, Pierre Omidyar suggested using the internet to find trading partners. Pierre understood Pamela’s unmet need and how important it was to her. He was a software programmer, so he was able to post Pamela’s PEZ dispensers on his personal site. He called the page Auction Web letting people list their items for auction. To his amazement, the site attracted so many buyers and sellers that he soon had to set up a separate site devoted to auctions, which he dubbed eBay. To understand if your dream, big idea or breakthrough innovation is a good idea, start with the Beneficiary Insight into their unmet needs. Pierre knew Pamela real well. He understood her passion for PEZ dispensers and believed addressing her unmet needs would make her real happy. Pierre and Pamela eventually married and are now billionaires from the success of eBay. They now discuss the unmet needs of the less fortunate and how their philanthropic Omidyar Network can help. We may [...]
April 11, 2013
PhD scientists should not fear losing their jobs to grandmothers, though they could benefit from visiting more often. That’s if the grandmother is the beneficiary of their research. If you have a dream, big idea or breakthrough innovation, the beneficiary(s) ultimately decides if it is a good idea. If your dream is for your daughter (beneficiary) to earn a college degree or for you (beneficiary) to lose 50 pounds, the beneficiary has the final say. If it’s Proctor & Gamble’s (P&G) PhD scientists trying to create a breakthrough innovation in floor cleaning, a grandmother (beneficiary) may know best. P&G had more PhD scientists, at one time, then any company in the world. The scientists were struggling to create a more effective way to clean floors without causing damage from abrasiveness. To trigger new ideas, P&G hired outside consultants to go into homes and watch people mop their floors. The homeowners made this more difficult as they would clean their floors before the consultants arrived. One day, a consultant took an aggressive action at the home of a grandmother. While ignoring the voice of his mom inside his head, he walked across the floor with his soiled shoes. The grandmother quickly [...]
March 28, 2013
Is it a good idea? How do you know? It’s a nagging dream that will not go away. It’s a big idea that quickly became a dilemma. It’s a breakthrough innovation that requires significant investment of resources and your personal reputation. Very often, the only answer comes by ignoring your uneasy nausea and trying to make it happen like these five people: Jeffrey: Quit Wall Street job to move across the country to build an online catalog to sell books Robert: Build a satellite phone system for $6B that will be accessible to most of the world Joanne: Write a book about wizards as a single parent on public subsidies rather than going to school or finding a job Roberto: Change the recipe of a beverage that has been losing sales to competitors William: Purchase land, described by some as useless, from someone in financial trouble for $7.2 million A good idea represents only 1% of making something happen. The remaining 99% (enablement) is doing all of the activities to ensure success. While the idea is 1%, the 99% (enablement) doesn’t happen unless you believe in the idea. Here is some self-reflecting Insight that may help you decide: Beneficiary Insight [...]
March 14, 2013
It may not seem like there is any correlation with online internet payments, 2013 Motor Trend car of the year, a spaceship docking to the International Space station and home solar energy. That is unless you know the man whose life story was the inspiration behind the main character, Tony Starks, in the movie Iron Man. The story begins when Elon Musk sold a computer program for $500 as a 12-year old boy living in his native Pretoria, South Africa. At age 17, Musk left his family to move half way around the world to attend a college in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He later earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in Business and Physics. He wanted to get into solving “important problems that would most affect the future of humanity”, as he said later, “One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space”.(1) Musk became a co-founder of PayPal, the successful online payment system. He was the largest shareholder when it was sold to eBay in 2002. That same year, Musk founded the company Space X. NASA began using SpaceX to deliver supplies to the International Space Station after it retired the Space Shuttles. [...]
February 28, 2013
Enduring Grit – thousands of little choices to make one big thing happen We saw the glamour and elegance of 4-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams on the Academy Awards red carpet on Sunday night. She wore a fairytale-inspired, princess ball-gown designed by Oscar de la Renta that was befitting the Disney princess she portrayed in the movie Enchanted. Her grace, radiance and entourage navigating the long gown of fluffy feathers were all visible. Her enduring grit, the reason she was there, could not be seen. It is the same enduring grit that could be hidden inside a janitor, bellhop, waitress, debt collector, peanut vendor or a man in a chicken suit. We may be motivated to become a star, lose weight or start a business. Yet it’s the enduring grit of thousands of little choices that can make one big thing happen. We romanticize the dream, big idea or breakthrough innovation without learning the real glamour of how people like Amy make it happen. Amy could not afford college. She didn’t want a large student loan knowing the debt would make it harder for her to become a performer. She worked as a greeter at the GAP displaying the same [...]
February 13, 2013
What do you want to be when you grow up? There may not be a more stressful question you could ask a high school or college student. If it’s any console to them, many adults in their forties and fifties struggle with the same question. Do you really want to keep doing this for the rest of your working life? This question can be difficult whether you’re at your desired destination or in the last place you could have imagined. The students of today may need to perfect answering this question. It is likely they will be asked this often through 2060 when many of them will still be working. If you are like most, you have struggled to answer one or both of these questions during one or more times throughout your life. While there are no easy answers, key insight may lie within us. We should feel good that we have the luxury of asking ourselves these questions. It’s a luxury few had 100 years ago when over 90% of people worked on farms or in factories. At that time, people felt grateful for any paycheck and proud to be able to meet the basic needs of their [...]
January 30, 2013
It’s hard to imagine the sense of freedom and prosperity that people must have felt when the automobile was invented. By the 1920’s, Ford was able to mass produce the Model T for as low as $260, making it affordable for average families. It offered mobility to find new higher paying jobs, suburban homes with backyards and many new leisure time activities. Mass production was the catalyst for the surge in prosperity in the 20th century. It lifted family incomes. It made homes and material goods, unimaginable in the 19th century, an affordable reality. Today, the prosperity catalyst is something much more subtle. It’s not discussed often yet it’s responsible for all of the job growth in the last several decades. It’s our progression to “tailoring solutions for individuals” from “individuals conforming to products”. One hundred years ago, Ford Model T’s were all black, phones were all black while attached to the wall and few homes had backyards. Today, we have infinite choices and options for cars, phones and homes. Even our products are intuitive enough (maybe with a kids help) to personalize to our individual needs without the lengthy owner’s manuals of the past. The good news is that [...]
January 17, 2013
If you are four times (37% vs. 8.3%) as successful as the average of your peers, would you be satisfied? Not if your big idea, like Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, is to be ten times better. It is amazing what happens when a big idea becomes the mission of an organization. NASA’s mission became achieving President Kennedy’s big idea to send a man to the moon and return him safely home. Wikipedia’s mission was to deliver Jimmy Wales’ big idea that every person be given free access to the sum of human knowledge. Apple’s mission aligned with Steve Job’s big idea to build a phone with one button that is simply to use. While man on the moon, ubiquitous human knowledge and the iPhone are truly amazing feats, they may not be as challenging as Feinberg’s and Levin’s big idea. Their big idea is to ensure low income students have the same college graduation rates as high income students. In 1994, they founded KIPP Academy charter schools with a mission to achieve their big idea. In 1999, KIPP Academy’s eighth grade students, from low income families, had the highest scores of any school in the Bronx, NY and 5th [...]
