Page 29 - The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas

After becoming CEO of Ford, Donald Petersen replaced sophisticated rules that a design center had
to follow for creating new cars with a simple guideline: “Design something that you would be proud
to park in your driveway.” This change in direction for the brains of Ford engineers allowed them to
design the highly successful Ford Taurus.

Toyota management asked employees, “Please give ideas of how the company can become more
productive” and received very few ideas. Later they reworded the question to “How can you make
your job easier?” and received an enormous amount of valuable ideas.

Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine by changing a question from “How can we prevent
smallpox?” to “Why don’t milkmaids get smallpox?”

In many instances, if you can’t create a successful business idea, it means that you simply asked a
wrong question. When you are stuck and don’t make any progress, spend some time restating a
question. By describing a problem in several different ways, you will look at it from different
perspectives and generate different ideas. Even a tiny change in the question that you ask yourself may
dramatically improve the quantity and quality of business ideas that your subconscious will generate.