Page 45 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

was considering some market applications.
Design finally created a prototype: a perfect circle. Sales and Marketing

gushed. They knew they had a unique product with a huge market.
But Bedrock’s Planners shouted, “Wait! Not so fast. We’re not ready.”
When pressed, the lead planner offered his visionary and ultimately

disastrous reasons: “Look, you can see the trends. Men are tired of chasing
woolly mammoths for food. So men will want to ride on these wheels. And men
love speed; look, for example, at the way they have sex. So they’ll want to go
faster and faster on these wheels. That means you’ll need wheels with traction—
a smooth wheel won’t work.”

Naturally, an impatient fellow Bedrock executive finally asked, “So what do
you recommend?”

“Simple,” the prophetic planner announced.
“Delay the launch. We need to wait until man invents vulcanized rubber.”
Preposterous? No; business. Years ago a Bloomington-based company
created some astonishingly good multimedia software. This company wasn’t just
positioned to ride the multimedia wave—it was the wave. But the founders
wanted an insanely great product. Did the world want that? No. The world
wanted what the software company had right then. The world needed a plain old
wheel and was ready to pay for it.
The company’s endless analysis and waiting ended up proving that he who
hesitates is lost. Other companies caught up and passed this company before the
company released version 1.0.
Today’s good idea almost always will beat tomorrow’s better one.
Do it now.The business obituary pages are filled with planners who waited.

Fallacy: Patience Is a Virtue (The Shark Rule)

Most people believe that organizations work on the principle of inertia:
Organizations tend to stay as they are, either at rest or in motion.

But it appears that organizations actually are subject to the law that governs
sharks: If a shark does not move, it cannot breathe. And it dies.

Moving organizations tend to keep moving. Dormant ones tend to run out of
air and die.

To worsen this problem, not moving rarely causes any immediate pain to an
organization. This encourages even more waiting. “Hey, we waited to make sure
we were right, and nothing bad happened, so that’s good.”