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106 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

men.” At Citibank, top management saw the change as an opportunity
and acted on it.
All these examples, however, also show the critical problem in
perception-based innovation: timing. If Ford had waited only one
year after the fiasco of the Edsel, it might have lost the “lifestyle”
market to GM’s Pontiac. If Citibank had not been the first one to
recruit women MBAs, it would not have become the preferred
employer for the best and most ambitious of the young women aim-
ing to make a career in business.
Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in
exploiting a change in perception. In the first place, a good many of
what look like changes in perception turn out to be short-lived fads.
They are gone within a year or two. And it is not always apparent
which is fad and which is true change. The kids playing computer
games were a fad. Companies which, like Atari, saw in them a change
in perception lasted one or two years—and then became casualties.
Their fathers going in for home computers represented a genuine
change, however. It is, furthermore, almost impossible to predict what
the consequences of such a change in perception will be. One good
example are the consequences of the student rebellions in France,
Japan, West Germany, and the United States. Everyone in the late
1960s was quite sure that these would have permanent and profound
consequences. But what are they? As far as the universities are con-
cerned, the student rebellions seem to have had absolutely no lasting
impact. And who would have expected that, fifteen years later, the
rebellious students of 1968 would have become the “Yuppies” to
whom Senator Hart appealed in the 1984 American primaries, the
young, upward-mobile professionals, ultra-materialistic, job con-
scious, and maneuvering for their next promotion? There are actual-
ly far fewer “dropouts” around these days than there used to be—the
only difference is that the media pay attention to them. Can the emer-
gence of homosexuals and lesbians into the limelight be explained by
the student rebellion? These were certainly not the results the stu-
dents themselves in 1968, nor any of the observers and pundits of
those days, could possibly have predicted.
And yet, timing is of the essence. In exploiting changes in percep-
tion, “creative imitation” (described in Chapter 17) does not work. One
has to be first. But precisely because it is so uncertain whether a change
in perception is a fad or permanent, and what the consequences really
are, perception-based innovation has to start small and be very specific.