Einstein said that all great original ideas at first appear absurd. This is why it is so easy to dismiss radical suggestions when they surface. We point out that they are absurd and so miss great opportunities. How would you react if an unorthodox business idea was presented to you and you could immediately see problems with it? Imagine that you are the boss in each of these situations:
1. Spectacles manufacturer in the 1960s
Employee: I think we should investigate a new idea I have heard about called contact lenses.
Boss: How does it work?
Employee: We make prescription lenses that people attach to their eyeballs so that they can see well without spectacles.
Boss: You mean I stick a piece of glass onto my eyeball?
Employee: It could be glass or plastic.
Boss: That is ridiculous. What if it slipped behind the eye? What if it damaged the eye? We could be sued for millions. No-one is going to want something so dangerous and inconvenient. Spectacles are safe, cheap and popular. Let’s focus on doing what we know.
2. Radio manufacturer in the 1980s
Employee: I read about this guy Trevor Bayliss who has invented a clockwork radio. It is an interesting idea – do you think we should look at this?
Boss: Don’t be silly. I heard about this too. It will never catch on.
Employee: Really?
Boss: Sure. Let me give you three reasons. First radios need electricity and the easiest way to get that is through the mains or batteries – that is what consumers and the trade want. Secondly the radio will have to be really big to contain the winding mechanism. Third, the radio will suddenly stop in the middle of a programme waiting to be wound up – how annoying will that be? Customers want convenience – not the bother of stopping to wind up a radio every 10 minutes.
Employee: I guess you are right.
3. Website entrepreneur in 2000s
Programmer: I have this idea for a new social media site.
Boss: Great. How does it work?
Programmer: People can make short broadcasts of up to 140 characters.
Boss: 140 characters! Why restrict them? Can they add pictures, music and videos?
Programmer: No – it is just a box for 140 characters of text.
Boss: Don’t be silly. Facebook and Myspace already offer far more than that. We need something more exciting than a text box. How about we copy Facebook and add more features?
See how easy it is? Every day in every organisation bosses are rejecting interesting ideas because the ideas look silly. How can you overcome this problem? You train people to ask questions rather than be judgmental. When somebody comes to you with a bizarre idea do not find fault with it; instead ask questions. How could we make it work? What are the benefits for customers if this happened? Is there a better way to do this?
If you want innovation in your organisation then you must encourage people at all levels to welcome, entertain and explore crazy ideas – they are the ones that can lead to breakthroughs.
Agree, though I think it could be considerably difficult to generate buy-in and support during the initial stages after you have brainstormed and come up with what you think is a brilliant idea or new concept, one that could work and click and possibly make you famous and rich. It all depends on whom you know to pitch your idea, and who can support or give voice to your idea. It is different in each case, well-established gurus coming up with ideas are readily hearteningly accepted encouraged and praised but if the same idea comes from someone of mediocre or nil personal branding it could just be dismissed as just another ‘crazy talk’. It also depends on luck.
It’s always easy to point out “how great ideas” are killed. The job of an inventor and visionary is to communicate the idea.
Plus any GOOD executive knows that often niche products that concentrate in one specific service / function (like your Twitter example) always have a good chance for success, because there is a “need” already there.
Instead of talking how good / radical ideas get killed – you should write about how to communicate / sell them.
Do you have any good or radical ideas how to sell them?
Please don’t confuse brilliant product ideas for brilliant marketing techniques.
Thank you,
Florin
[...] a new post at their blog about this very thing. It made me think…so I had to share: “How to Kill a Radical Idea” by Paul [...]
SO, I think that the author did not propose any solution to help those has the ability to innovate. The whole post talked only about the everyday killing of great ideas. Every body has exprienced that, at least. Recently, I was applying for a job and I proposed sth not new. I mean not new for web 2.0 geeks, on my country it is so, especially, for corporate holders. I proposed to use web 2.0 to promote a website. They listened to my strategy. The first reaction we don’t need emarketing, we want SEO. I asked the man who said so what do you mean? He said I wanna my website to be the first on google. Yes, this is the best solution to combine online and the offline website optimisation and e-reputation and social media is part of the offline if do it properly we will rank and diverse of source traffic. No, I don’t need a emarketer I am looking for SEO expert. Then, the discussion turned to be a battlefield, istead of presenting my strategy I was obliged to do explain fully what is web 2.0, what page fun, digg, bookmarking and so on. Why are they too imprtant?…
Finally, I lost control and said to the that stupid -who consider himself as an expert- you still using the basic technics of SEO while, nowadays, SEO progress and new techniques appear everyday, you need to update yourself. The result, the job has fly away. hhhhhhh
why am I typing all these words, because when I read the title I was expecting solutions. If I had been able to motivate them, surely, I’d have been experiencing new things. Unfortunately, I am not.
Other memorable quotes from the past..
Xerox Exec: “You want Xerox to consider something called a mouse?”
And even the brilliant minds were wrong at times. Bill Gates: “640K ought to be enough for anybody”
What you seem to forget: 99% of silly ideas are exactly that: silly ideas. Only in retrospect do we know which ones belong to the 1% of great ideas.
Nice text, congratulations!
So true. Often the very best ideas seem stupid at first.
Yeah, great ideas may seem stupid at first. But when the details are laid out, they start to look a little better. Creativity should always be encouraged no matter what the raw outcome is.
hi:)
I like two posts : yours and orangeguru. both of you got it right. to give birth to your product/ idea you need to believe in it first, before anyone else will. and then sell it.
I have recently been listening to a very interesting conversation between R.Kiyosaki and Keith J. Cunningham( it is on of the cd’s for the Cashflow game)
about monetizing your ideas- finding funding. what they both agreed on was:
you have to be able to tell a story about your product/idea. and possess some additional qualities, we are all aware of this.
you need to be able to imagine your idea in reality and then let other people see it too
best wishes to You !
thanks
Martyna
hi, just want to say this is a great article, reminding me of why we should be aware that there are people with different strenghts & ‘talents’.
There are people who are good at being a visionaire, creative, or the so-called ‘catalyst’of new ideas, but they’re usually not good in marketing skill.
on the other hand, there are people who are good at marketing skill, but they have really hard time, or even perhaps never even once has the creativity & ‘guts’ to dare to envision a new, & that so-called radical ideas!
What would be the ideal, and best thing (& day!) in every corporation/company would be for people with those different strenghts & talents & skills to work TOGETHER, instead of fighting each other.
I agree,
if it’s not because of the open-mindedness quality we as human beings have,
we surely can’t imagine how many of those “radical ideas” would get forever lost, buried, and never come out in the world like today.
People need to be more open-minded, before quickly judging everything as “too impossible”.
We all know that often it is not the smartest people who succeed, but the boldest, the most determined one, & also the open-minded ones (instead of being too analytical about everything).
This article is practically fraudulent. Good ideas are often misunderstood and ignored, yes. But the vast majority of ideas are simply not viable. Venture capitalists make their living funding great ideas—but the fact is, most of their investments don’t pay off. If they could find the Googles and Facebooks and leave behind the duds, they would. But you have to fund a lot of ideas that all sound pretty crazy to find the ones that survive.
Separating the absurd-because-it-is-genius from the absurd-because-it-is-absurd is hardly a straightforward process. The article suggests that there is some magical quality manifested about the truly great ideas that if we just tuned our senses to, we would see it. Nonsense. The very best of the people who make their living trying to find the next great idea—venture capitalists, movie/tv/theater producers, book publishers, etc., can’t even do that.
This is just peddling epistemological fallacy as a feel-good slogan.
Given the volume of ideas available, what is needed is better tools to evaluate ideas. That is, to better *reject bad ideas*. Some blockbuster ideas may still be rejected. It happens. But if someone has a fantastic idea, and can’t be bothered stand up to conventional-wisdom opposition and put their own reputation, money, career, or pride at stake to back it, to fight for it, to actually do it and show people they are wrong, then either their idea really was lame or they are someone who couldn’t make the best idea work anyway even if they did have it.
Yeah, I disagree with the article. Chiefly with the fact that an “idea” has some sort of a given, unchangeable attribute. Good, bad, practical etc and that we need to see it.
The more realistic view is IMO, that the relevance and practicality of ideas is changing with how the society and circumstances change.
So in the majority of cases, the *same* idea will be rightfully terrible, excellent, useless and all the other things, depending on the times, technology, society, context and timing.
This mocking of “failing to see the next big thing” is just being the monday morning quarterback, and insulting people who smartly reject nonsensical ideas. The whole idea that when such ideas later become popular makes the people who rejected them stupid is terribly superficial.
man great post
Hmm, I’m not actually convinced that wind-up radios or twitter actually qualify as good ideas (obviously contact lenses are). I mean sure they’re sucessful, but personally I find both frivolous, and kinda stupid.
It’s interesting how small minded we humans can be sometimes, isn’t it? We probably reject many bizarre ideas every day, not just in business but in our everyday activities. Then, we become hard on ourselves for not thinking of money-making, revolutionary ideas sooner. Sometimes, all we need to do is to curb our pre-disposed ideas, open our minds a little more and stop to ask questions. Who knows? The next bizarre idea we hear may be our ticket to success.
P.S. Check out http://budurl.com/zmc4 and see how building your idea and finding the right opportunity can help you become a successful entrepreneur.
and who said twitter is a successful radical idea? it’s still barely a start-up. it will fail and will go down to the state of silent obsolence. Like, say, Second Life. AA It’s no fun to live with an ad after all.
My goodness.
Paul writes about how ideas get killed and what does orangeguru do?
Well?
He kills it! No contructive remarks, just saying that it is the inventors job to sell the idea.
Now don’t get me wrong, it IS part of the job of an inventor to sell an idea. But it is equally the other party’s job to listen and not judge immediately.
More importantly, it is both party’s job to find the hidden assumptions in the ideas and test those. Then build upon the feedback.
Who would of thought putting sleeves in a blanket would be good idea. Now we have the Snuggie!
[...] How to Kill a Radical Idea [...]
This is misleading. For every good idea that was shot down for being absurd, there are probably 1000 more that truly *are* absurd. It's easy to pull the exceptions out like this and make much of it, but the fact is that the stated examples were in fact produced, so clearly someone gave them a go. Blindly saying, "we need to give crazy ideas a chance," just opens the floodgates to unqualified people coming out with ridiculous concepts that can't work. Intelligently saying, "we need to be open minded when we review what looks to be crazy on the surface" is a better way to put it, but I don't think this post addresses it that way. Let's eschew the knee-jerk sensationalism and get back to proper critical thinking.
[...] How to Kill a Radical Idea (by Paul Sloane, 132) [...]