Page 147 - Free the Idea Monkey

What makes this failure so utterly unbelievable is that it seems
if Motorola had stopped to measure the power of their insight, they
would have found out that there are only 150 people who climb
Everest each year. And even if you assume the market for people
who absolutely, positively need to be able to make a call no matter
where they are in the known universe at any given point, you only
have a market of say, 1,322. That simply was not going to support
Motorola’s investment.

But it did not matter.
The Idea Monkeys at Motorola, in this case brilliant technolo-
gists and thought leaders, were apparently so enamored with the
satellite-driven technology that there was just no stopping them ...
unfortunately for Motorola’s shareholders.

GREAT INSIGHTS START WITH GREAT QUESTIONS
There are seven key questions you want to ask to discover a

key insight: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? And finally,
how many?

Dig deeper and you can build a list of hundreds of questions
that naturally fall out of these seven from a client, consumer and
customer perspective. These questions may include:

• What are the consumers’/customers’ current behaviors?
• What are the consumers’ needs (met and unmet, articulated

and unarticulated)?
• H ow are consumers solving current challenges?
• W hen, where and why do they do what they do to solve these

challenges?
• Who are they doing it with?

Who? What? When?
Where? Why? How?
And ... how many?

132 I G N O R A N C E I S B L I S S . I T I S A L S O E X P E N S I V E .