Page 46 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Not-moving begets more not-moving. By the time the delayed consequences
of all this not-moving occur—one of which is that action-oriented people in the
company flee the company, making the company even more waiting-oriented—it
often is too late to correct them.

Act like a shark. Keep moving.

Fallacy: Think Smart (The Crab Concept)

At Carmichael-Lynch Advertising in the late 1980s, we conceived several
awards for our group’s creative people. My favorite was the Crab Plaque.

This plaque, awarded for the Stupidest Idea, featured a windup plastic crab,
because crabs move laterally, symbolizing the power of lateral thinking. Because
lateral ideas do not follow in a straight line from the thinking that preceded
them, they usually look stupid at first.

But we needed more stupid thinking. We had too much smart thinking; our
average Stanford-Binet exceeded 120, easy. We just needed to be stupider— and
to be unafraid of coming up with seemingly stupid ideas, which often turn out
the best.

As we learned every day, highly intelligent people are the world’s foremost
experts at squashing good ideas. That’s because intelligent people have one
absolute favorite use for their formidable intelligence: telling other people, with
total conviction and logic, why other people’s ideas will not work.

Planning tends to attract these people, but they are dangerous. As smart as
they are, their memories fail them; they always forget that good ideas often
sound ludicrous at first.

Think dumb.

The Fallacy of Science and Data

Nothing said in a business meeting can match the force of any statement
preceded by the words “The research shows . . .”

That’s because “research” connotes something scientific. But there are no
rigorous sciences of human behavior. The social sciences consist, at best, of
some well-supported general observations.

Planning research is not research in the best scientific sense. It’s insurance.
The former research director of a large food company, in fact, confessed that he