| thepowerofpain.com :: the pain papers :: newsletter #20 |
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——————————————————————————————————- How Pain Acts as a Catalyst for Change and Innovation ——————————————————————————————————- The Pain Papers ——————————————————————————————————- SHARE THE WEALTH. FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. For past issues of The Pain Papers, see... To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
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——————————————————————————————————- FLIGHT 93, THE TWIN TOWERS, AND INNOVATION A friend mentioned that he read this story... https://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20020903/ts_usatoday/4412365 ...over the weekend. The gist was that where people were located in the World Trade Center had a lot to do with whether they survived or not. This comment reminded me of something that someone else made recently about the people who were aboard Flight 93, the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. What do these two groups of people have in common? It's simple. The people who were on Flight 93 and many of the people who made it out of the WTC each possessed a crucial piece of information that most other people lacked. They understood the severity of the situation. This understanding of the severity of the situation had a profound impact on their actions. In the case of the people on Flight 93, it led them to try to overtake the men who had hijacked their plane. It wasn't that the people on the three other planes were cowards or that the people on Flight 93 were disproprotionately Type A's. The difference was that the people on Flight 93, as a result of desperate cell phone conversations with loved ones, had a sense of the hijackers' intentions. The people on the 3 other planes did not have this information and thus did not know to act. In the case of many of the people who escaped from the WTC, the sight of the other tower in flames or of others leaving led them to get out of the building as fast as they could. In contrast, many of the people who died were those who were on the lower floors, on the sides of the buildings that faced outward, or in groups that (for whatever reason) decided not to leave. In a way, they died because they did not appreciate the true severity of the situation. What does this have to do with innovation? It's also simple. As I make clear in "The Power of Pain," one of the hardest things when it comes to innovation is getting people to act. For a number of reasons, people are more likely to put up with problem situations than they are to do soemthing about them. One of these reasons is something called The Bystander Effect. Essentially, most people are heavily influenced by the behavior of others. They look to and study others to try to determine what is going on and use this information to judge how they should respond to a situation (see page 27 of Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" for another tragic scene of this principle in action). In the case of the WTC, the people who saw the other building in flames or saw people fleeing judged that this was likely an emergency. The people who did not leave saw the inaction or lack of action of others and misjudged the situation. Of course, you can also get into a circular situation called Pluralistic Ignorance in which everyone thinks something is wrong but fails to flee because nobody else is fleeing. The challenge for businesses is to understand that both the Bystander Effect and Pluralistic Ignorance also come into play on a much smaller (but still significant) scale when it comes to the problems their employees and customers deal with. Too many people fail to speak up about the problems they are experiencing precisely because nobody else is speaking up. They judge the lack of action of others to be evidence that the problem is their alone. What smart businesses will do is provide forums for dissatisfied employees and customers to voice their grievances. Out of these individual grievances may come the sense of a much larger opportunity. ——————————————————————————————————- DEBEERS, DIAMONDS, AND CREATING NEEDS People often ask me whether you can create a need. My chief answer is that you should seek to discover needs, not create them. The exception that proves the rule is the work that DeBeers has done to create a need for diamonds. While it is true that they likely created a need, they had the money (billions of dollars) and time (decades) that most of us do not possess. Those of us who don't run cartels should stick to discovering needs. https://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.htm ——————————————————————————————————- HDTV The fiasco of HDTV here in the United States is a great example of an innovation that is not pain driven (and one for the Hall of Shame). The replacement of analog TVs with HDTV is going so slowly that the federal government is beign forced to jumpstart the process by 1. forcing all TVs to come with HDTV decoders and 2. cutting off analog signals at some point. Of course, the problem is that HDTV is a classic "11." It is neat and cool but the benefits do not outweigh the costs of switching. Analog TV is good enough. It may be sub-optimal, but it's not broken. https://www.thepowerofpain.com/hallofshame.html https://www.thepowerofpain.com/thepainpapers/archives/thepainpapers_newsletter11_11202001.html ——————————————————————————————————- BUDGET BILLING I was up at 2AM last night reading and noticed that my air conditioning was still running. After listening to it for a few minutes, I realized it had likely run all day and would probably run all night. However, this fact didn't affect me ask much as it would have affected my father because of a pain-relieving innovation known as Budget Billing. Instead of facing a $300 dollar electricity bill, the power company will conveniently spread the cost of the Summer over the year. The result is that my power bills are more even. It also means that I am more likely to use more power than I would be if I had to pay as I went. How could you use the Budget Billing model to reduce the pain being felt by your customers and thus increase their net consumption of your products? ——————————————————————————————————- THE DENT ERASER I was listening to NPR the other day and came across this segment... https://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?segID=148649 ...which talks about a product called The Dent Eraser. Now, while there may not be a huge market for this product, this is a prototypical story about a pain-driven innovation. For more information go to... https://www.unitedmusical.com/product/010102-1.htm ——————————————————————————————————- WHY DO PAIN-DRIVEN INNOVATIONS STILL FAIL? Tod Shultz (shultzga@ga.prestige.net) writes... "Why do problems that clearly alleviate pain remain unsuccessful? A friend developed a product called SkiDaddle that clearly meets a need and eliminates the pain and hassle of toting snow skis yet he has sold fewer than 1000 of them even at deep discounts. The product has gooten ww exposure.......any ideas I could pass along...books that may help? https://www.dfw.net/~morris/Skidad.html Keep up the good work." How has your friend tried to sell the product? My suggestion would be to try to sell them at a few resorts at a time. You have to build up critical mass. Also, target (e.g. give stuff away to) people like instructors or others. The goal is to get ordinary people seeing and asking about the product. Is the Web site visible on the product itself? Can people who are walking behind you see the name of the product and the Web site? Also, read the Howard Head profile on my site. You have to sell a product like this in a top down manner. That means first selling the ski instructors and other resort personnel. https://www.thepowerofpain.com/stories/the_head_ski.html Also, zoza.com is an example of a pain-driven innovation that failed. As the stories below point out...
...the goal of Zoza was to create action clothes that also looked nice. Kind of Prada crossed with Patagonia. I do like this idea, but it failed for several reasons. First, they got way ahead of themselves. They spent $7 million on their Web site, for one. They should have stayed small until they got it right. Second, their market may have been too small to be viable (especially given their cost structure). Third, they did stupid things like creating a product that people loved and then screwed up their supply chain. People will not buy even a pain-driven product if the process is a pain. ——————————————————————————————————- Please send all comments or feedback to chris@thepowerofpain.com SHARE THE WEALTH. FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER. Any other unauthorized publication, excerpting, or duplication of the contents without the permission of Christopher K. O'Leary is a violation of copyright law. To subscribe to The Pain Papers, please send a message
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