Page 142 - Free the Idea Monkey

OK, stop for a second. Read the previous list again and see how
good you are at this; which one of my guesses was right?

The fact is, all my answers were right — sort of. But if I had gone
into the Scooter business based on any or even all of these “insights”
governing how I positioned my Scooter business, I would have lost
my shirt. I had a bunch of what I considered solid, educated guesses
and I was able to get pretty close to the answer, but as the cliché
goes, close only works when you are playing horseshoes or throw-
ing hand grenades. In business, close is too often another word for
“pending bankruptcy.”

Now think. The last time you started an innovation initiative,
didn’t you come to the table with solid, educated guesses? Didn’t
smart people within your organization talk about an ingredient or
technology that you had that was clearly superior to the competi-
tion? Wasn’t there a feeling in the room that the collective experience
was enough to figure out the challenge without doing a whole bunch
of research? Didn’t you think that you had it figured out? In this
case, I did—and I was wrong.

In this case, my insights were right, but they were insufficient
(in addition to being obvious). Of course, seniors feel confined and
want to get out and do things; of course, seniors want easy
technology; of course, seniors don’t want to feel
like a burden ... but all those things completely
missed the one insight that has been the driving
force behind the Scooter Store’s success for the last two
decades. If you see their ads on TV today, you still hear this
version of the promise that uses Doug’s
key insight as its marketing hook: “If
we approve you for a Scooter and
Medicare refuses to pay for it, we’ll
give it to you for free—guaranteed.”

It turns out that the key insight
was that seniors wanted scooters
because they wanted more free-
dom, but they were afraid they couldn’t afford them. Doug
learned the most important insight for his business: if that

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