Dangerous Ideas — Maybe Everybody is Wrong

In my constant search for the really "big idea," I invest in four of the most dynamic sectors of the world economy: biotech, energy, consumer products and information technology. These are four fast-moving industries with many very smart people. I love learning from the different entrepreneurs I meet. Three of the qualities I prize in a CEO are curiosity, humility and a creative dissatisfaction with the status quo. Lateral thinking can transform industries. Often the lessons from one business can translate into "insanely great" ideas for a totally unrelated business.

Henry Ford made himself one of the richest men in the world by seeing a connection between meat packing and car production. He did not invent the automobile. For over thirty years hundreds of automobile manufacturers hand-assembled cars one at a time in garages. One day, Ford took a tour of a meat packing plant. He learned that the meat industry had learned to improve productivity by dividing complex and tedious tasks into a series of specialized tasks each performed by a seperate butcher. Ford had the humility to look outside his industry for a revolutionary idea. He had the audacity to believe that maybe he and the most successful men in his industry were wrong. He also took massive action to exploit his learnings.

First Comes the Breakthrough and the Opposition from the Establishment....
What is so exciting to me is that what we "know" is constantly being challenged. The best ideas are often considered dangerous by the establishment. The 2005 Nobel prize in Medicine was won by Dr. Barry Marshall for proving that stomach ulcers were not caused by stress but by bacterial infections. What made the story of his Nobel so interesting was the opposition he faced because his idea was so controversial. He was prevented by his University's Institutional Review Board from recruiting patients for his study, so he swallowed a large dose of the ulcer-causing bacteria to prove his belief.

Next Comes the Business Opportunity
It is now believed that stroke and heart disease as well as many other common diseases may be related to bacterial infections. This should be a major opportunity for the antibiotic drug companies. Unfortunately there is a road block. Only 2% of all strains of bacteria can be cultivated in the lab. Now how can you make money off that? I recently ran into a really cool company — www.athenabio.com — that believes it has figured out how to produce many of these hard to cultivate strains.

How can lateral thinking transform your business?
Are you a good listener? Are you a thoughtful observer? Do you have the humility to accept that you may be wrong? It is an audacious humility that says perhaps we have been wrong all along. Are you willing to consider "dangerous ideas? My friend and mentor Bob LeBeau brought to my attention www.edge.org, which publishes the answers to a provocative question given by a large group of the world's leading scientists and thinkers. Here's the link to this year's question, "What is your most Dangerous Idea?"