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Source: The Unexpected 41

Far more often, the unexpected success is simply not seen at all.
Nobody pays any attention to it. Hence, nobody exploits it, with the
inevitable result that the competitor runs with it and reaps the
rewards.
A leading hospital supplier introduced a new line of instruments
for biological and clinical tests. The new products were doing quite
well. Then, suddenly, orders came in from industrial and university
laboratories. Nobody was told about them, nobody noticed them;
nobody realized that, by pure accident, the company had developed
products with more and better customers outside the market for
which those products had been developed. No salesman was being
sent out to call on these new customers, no service force was being
set up. Five or eight years later, another company had taken over these
new markets. And because of the volume of business these markets
produced, the newcomer could soon invade the hospital market offer-
ing lower prices and better services than the original market leader.
One reason for this blindness to the unexpected success is that our
existing reporting systems do not as a rule report it, let alone clamor
for management’s attention.
Practically every company—but every public-service institution
as well—has a monthly or quarterly report. The first sheet lists the
areas in which performance is below expectations: it lists the prob-
lems and the shortfalls. At the monthly meetings of the management
group and the board of directors, everybody therefore focuses on the
problem areas. No one even looks at the areas where the company has
done better than expected. And if the unexpected success is not quan-
titative but qualitative—as in the case of the hospital instruments
mentioned above, which opened up new major markets outside the
company’s traditional ones—the figures will not even show the unex-
pected success as a rule.
To exploit the opportunity for innovation offered by unex-
pected success requires analysis. Unexpected success is a symp-
tom. But a symptom of what? The underlying phenomenon may
be nothing more than a limitation on our own vision, knowledge,
and understanding. That the pharmaceutical companies, for
instance, rejected the unexpected success of their new drugs in
the animal market was a symptom of their own failure to know
how big—and how important—livestock raising throughout the
world is; of their blindness to the sharp increase in demand for
animal proteins throughout the world after World War II,