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responsibilities’.162 Not only did she found and run her own business,
she also exclusively recruited women, recognising that there was a huge
pool of untapped human resources in the form of women with IT skills
who had left their jobs to raise children. In addition, Dame Stephanie
challenged the convention that ‘there weren’t any software developers
in the commercial world because software was considered relatively
unimportant and given away free with hardware’.163

people power Monsanto, producer of genetically modified food,
experienced the full power of convention when it sought to introduce
its products into the European market. It failed to win the public debate
on the benefits of genetically modified food and its potential to reduce
world famine and disease.

Once the products were launched, Monsanto compounded the
communication failure by appearing not to offer a clearly labelled
choice to consumers between organic and genetically modified food.
Monsanto eventually withdrew from the European market.

is it just me who’s mad or is it the others? A particularly
poignant illustration of conventional group-think is offered by the story
of Charles Merrill. At the acceleration point of the great bull market in
1928, Merrill started to obsess that the American stock market was
bound to collapse. Conventional thinking among his peers that the
stock-buying spree would continue was so powerful that Merrill was
advised to seek professional help.

A psychiatrist duly attended Merrill, but was able to reassure him that
his mental faculties were in perfect order. The very next morning, both
psychiatrist and patient started to sell their stocks. Merrill’s exit from
the stock market at least a year before it crashed provided him with the
means subsequently to establish his firm, Merrill Lynch.

perfecting the known rather than addressing the unknown In
the 1870s, Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray were both working
independently on an urgent problem with the telegraph network,
namely how to send more than one message over the wire at any given
time. Experiments by both led both to realise that speech could also be
transmitted over the wire, provided a transmitter were available to
convert speech into electronic signals.

It is certainly the case that Bell filed his patent application literally
hours before the patent caveat of Elisha Gray. On the basis of its earlier