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•xvi The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

shortly afterwards comes the mobile phone Idea 96 whose growth we can still only
guess at, but in sheer volume will probably be the fastest ever, for the time being.
This last one, the mobile phone, has a well-recognised downside as do a remarkable
number of other great ideas. Where this is so, we have recorded it under the heading
‘On the other hand.’

In technology as well, we have not forgotten the enablers of technological leaps
forward. Windows cannot exist without the ‘graphical user interface’ (GUI), which
was the basic idea.

We have avoided the topics of inventions. We were looking for business ideas,
particularly ones that current managers might learn from, so generally speaking
there are no inventions per se.

This means that we have missed out, for example, the spectacular rise of glasses.
There is an Italian fresco of 1352, which is the earliest known representation of
spectacles. They were invented in medieval times to correct loss of ‘accommodating
power,’ the change in middle age that makes reading difficult. The earliest, made
between 1268 and 1289, were two magnifying glasses with their handles riveted
together, which were hand held or balanced on the nose. Concave glasses for short
sight arrived in the sixteenth century. Bifocals, for short sight and loss of accommo-
dating power, were invented about 1750 by Benjamin Franklin, the US statesman
and scientist. There is no doubt that a lot of people have made a lot of money out of
spectacles, but it counts as an invention and will not, therefore, be found in this
book.

But of course the way to become really wealthy in business is to take a cut of
other people’s labour, as any entrepreneur will tell you. How to organise people and
motivate them is another area where there have been some great ideas. Nineteenth-
century mill owners did it one way, the idea of Theory X and Theory Y Idea 62 did it
another.

In trying to pin down the 100 greatest ideas I also became from time to time
more philosophical. War Idea 72 and religion Idea 71 must have a mention as two
business drivers without equal. Now calling war a great business idea may seem