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Mining Data-text-web (1/28)

02 july 2013

Mining Data-text-web (1/28)

Weak Signals, Strong Ideas

By Andy Boynton, with William Bole

I often hear people ask, “What’s the next big thing?” Sometimes they’re talking about blockbuster products and companies that everyone might hear about soon. But people are also asking in connection with their own projects and organizations: What’s the next thing that’ll ramp up the value of my work and my business in a big way?

It’s a great question, but also a tricky one. That’s partly because the next “big” thing is often pretty small, at times barely recognizable. Or at least it starts out that way.

The ideas and innovations that make a difference often appear to us, at first, as mere fragments or flickers of an idea. They’re weak signals, easily missed. The best idea people know enough to pay attention to those signals and follow them through stages of reflection and development.

A classic example is the founding of Mary Kay Inc., the global direct sales company that started out as the faintest of signals.

In the early 1950s, Mary Kay Ash was selling mops and other household cleaning products at a house party in Texas, when she noticed something. It was the remarkably smooth complexions of the women there, which they owed to a homemade facial cream offered by their friend, the hostess.

Mary Kay Ash followed the weak signals.

At the time, Mary Kay was driven to be the best mop saleswoman she could be, and she could have easily forgotten about the women’s complexions (or not even noticed this weak signal in the first place). But she was interested in the skin cream: the hostess sent her home with a bottle, and it gave her face a similar glow.

Over the years she kept going back to the woman’s house to refill the bottle, for both her personal use and her search for ideas. She sought out the hostess’s father, a tanner who had devised a fluid for softening the hides of livestock. When he realized that the fluid also softened his hands, he concocted the formula for the beauty cream.

“Millions of satisfied Mary Kay users around the world today can thank some scarred horse’s ass for their radiant complexions,” the economist Todd G. Buchholz remarked in his 2007 book New Ideas from Dead CEOs.

But Mary Kay Ash had far more work to do with the ideas that traced back to the house party. After buying the rights to the tanner’s formula in 1963, she opened a retail skin-care and cosmetics outlet in Dallas—which failed. She started keeping a notebook of both good and bad ideas she had picked up while working for various direct-sales companies. She struck up conversations with colleagues and others about how to motivate a sales force.

There were other ideas to be found, tested, and tried. Along the way there were also personal trials—the loss of a job, the death of her first husband. But the ideas stayed in motion, leading to what would become a global independent network of more than two million sales people.

The Birdseye Test

How do you identify the weak signals that lead to the next big thing? If there were an easy answer to this, we’d all be celebrated innovators. One thing is clear: there’s no substitute for being in the habit of looking for ideas and working with them once they’re found.

Perhaps the mother of these habits is to simply be interested in the world around you—and attentive to its varied possibilities.

Frozen foods come to mind.

In the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of people journeyed far to take part in the Canadian fur trade. Many saw how inhabitants of the northerly regions stored their food in the winter—by burying the meats and vegetables in the snow. But probably few of them entertained thoughts about how this custom might relate to other fields of endeavor.

One who did was a young man named Clarence Birdseye, who spent four years on a fur-trading expedition that began a century ago—in 1912. He was amazed to find that freshly caught fish and duck, frozen quickly in such a fashion, retained their taste and texture. He started wondering: Why can’t we sell food in the United States that operates on the same basic principle? With such thoughts, an industry was born.

Birdseye developed the means of freezing foods rapidly, and then sold his ideas and processes to General Foods in 1930. (He later developed inexpensive freezer displays that enabled a system of distribution.) His name—adapted for brand purposes as Birds Eye—is still seen by all who open freezer doors in supermarkets.

One lesson is that ideas often do not start out auspiciously. Seldom are they served on a silver platter, fully baked with all the trimmings. More often than not, they’ll appear as a single ingredient (say, a curious custom far away), which needs to be cooked together with many other ingredients (e.g., ideas about retail distribution).

What seems critical is a keen awareness of the strong ideas that can develop from weak signals.

Andy Boynton is Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and coauthor, with Bill Fischer, of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen (Jossey-Bass), written with William Bole.