Page 129 - Free the Idea Monkey

You can talk, for example, about how now is exactly the right
time to increase advertising. As Harvard Business School professor
John A. Quelch noted, “ ... outline how you plan to create an MTV,
a Trader Joe’s or an iPod of your own, complete with an aggressive
launch timeline to ensure it is firmly established when the upheaval
in the marketplace ends.”

You can also point out that what you are advocating will leave
your company perfectly positioned once the problem(s) end. While
your competition is withdrawing, you will be charging ahead, taking
market share.

Maybe neither argument will carry the day. But if it does nothing
else, this kind of innovative thinking gives the boss another reason
to keep you around.

You may have heard this story. Two shoe salesmen from the same
company go to rural Asia in 1985. The first wires back this message:
“situation bleek, nobody wears shoes.” The second wires a different
message: “Opportunities everywhere!!! Everybody needs shoes!!!”
In times of challenge, the best (Ring)leaders know how to position
aggressive ideas and the best Idea Monkeys know how to generate
the ideas. And you guessed it, they sound just like the second shoe
salesperson. Which one are you?

Almost all problems are tem-
porary. Great companies and great
Idea Monkeys (and the people
who lead them) don’t abandon
their growth strategies in light of
temporary setbacks. They attack
aggressively, while everyone else is pulling back.

In 1915, Walter Cannon published his seminal work on acute
stress response. His theory boils down to this: all animals—includ-
ing humans—have evolved to deal with stress in one of two ways:
we stand and fight, or we run like crazy in the opposite direction.
My advice? When it doubt, fight!

114 T H E U P S I D E O F P R O B L E M S