During the 1970’s, BIC entered the U.S. market with a disposable razors and basically destroyed the market for the rather unchanged Gillette razor. As a result, Gillette went into the disposable razor market aggressively. But over the next 20 years, disposable razors became a commodity business where price ruled and Gillette’s profits fell so dramatically [...]
In 1895, King Gillette, a traveling salesman, looked at his dull straight razor that had to be stropped, decided he didn’t want to do that again and invented the safety razor. He was entrepreneurial and had been searching for a product – one that had to be used and replaced – around which to build [...]
Only a fool takes a venture away from its founding entrepreneur. It’s something like taking a baby away from its mother. William Crapo Durant put together General Motors by talking a series of hard-headed automotive entrepreneurs into trading his essentially worthless stock for his company. He was terrific in selling dreams but a disaster as [...]
Blake Mycoskie first visited the country of Argentina while competing in the second season of The Amazing Race with his sister in 2002. He returned there on vacation in January 2006, where he noticed that the local polo players were wearing a form of shoes called alpargatas; a simple canvas slip-on shoe that he himself [...]
When I was a kid, about 5 years old, I invented the steam engine by observing how the lid of a pot was moving up and down as the water within it boiled. The fact that someone had observed something like the same thing 200 years earlier makes no difference. I didn’t know that and [...]
To write a novel, daydream. Build that daydream into pieces of a story. Watch the characters in your daydream and describe what they do. Creating this type of daydream usually involves combining your experience, observation and invention. One neat way of doing that is through hindsight, “what if…” The “new” skills involved in writing a [...]
The King gave tasked Archimedes with determining whether his new crown was pure or adulterated gold. There was one contingent of this mission: Archimedes had to discover the truth without destroying the new crown nor marring its beauty. After much thought and effort, Archimedes realized the solution when he was getting in his bath. Watching [...]
Most people don’t know that knowledgable managers hire on the basis of personality, who someone is, rather than simply skills. Skills can be taught. Most people also don’t know what it is about their personality that employers most value. That’s what I call their Unrecognized Skills. Unrecognized Skills are skills that are so familiar that [...]
UPS is the world’s largest package delivery company, delivering an average of 15 million packages per day around the world. In 1907, James E. Casey, borrowed $100 from a friend and established the American Messenger Company, the forerunner of UPS, to deliver packages and run errands for retail stores in Seattle, Washington. Over the next [...]
Inventing involves giving your unconscious mind a “Search Target” that specifies the characteristics of what you’re trying to invent, prioritizing it and giving it the time required to sort through the billions of alternatives in its “database.” Every invention involves seeing existing things in a new context, something like “This (the invention) is like that [...]
