Incoming news release: via pigeon!
It’s 2008 and we are another year older and supposedly wiser. Well, that may be debatable! Which is possibly the reason my attention was drawn to this timesonline blog entry by Carol Lewis. I am a bit of a ‘fact finder’. I love snippets of useless information to store away for a rainy day.
And, at first glance Carol seems to have come across a great book full of useless facts and figures, The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made. It’s full of snippets that make us wonder, ‘Why I didn’t think of that?’
I’m sure that among the usual diet, smoking and exercise promises, many have made it their New Year’s resolution to come up with the next big idea.
But its when you actually read into how simple some ideas have developed into household brands you realise its more about the the person than the product.
For example, WeightWatchers was born in 1961 after Jean Nidetech was put on a diet by her obesity clinic. She invited six of her friends to join in as as support, and had the birth of a billion dollar business.
Many of the points in this book aren’t so much individual decisions made by management as much as people believing in their own abilities and ideas and having the confidence to communicate them.
Take Julius Reute, who used the carrier pigeon to communicate financial information between Belgium and Germany way back in 1850. Eventually his idea evolved into Reuters News Wire service, which added with the development of the Internet gives us the ability to reach any media source throughout the globe with a touch of a key.
And Coca-Cola’s decision to listen its customers rather than the business advisor when it decided to revert to its original recipe in 1989, enabled them to hold onto their number one position.
So, for all those of you who are looking for the next big idea in 2008, it isn’t necessarily all down to having the next greatest gadget. You can have the simplest of ideas. Your success depends on how well you communicate if you really want to make your mark in history.
Filed under: public relations
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Here, Here. To the point.
I think it is also about being excited about your idea (i.e you jump up in the morning out of bed; you don’t mind being laughed at for your idea; you don’t mind, sometimes, wondering ‘what on earth am I doing’ and so on). You might think something is a good idea, intellectually, but you need more than this to make it succeed!
I think ..