[continue from the Last Post]Exercise:
Imagine you’ve just arrived back home from a holiday. You have been clicking away and eagerly hand in your films for developing. Unfortunately…
Why did the photographs turn out as poor quality?
Follow the steps as described and the solutions will emerge. Try several possibilities.
Learn to cultivate a balance between logic and imagination. With logic, we play within the boundaries, whereas imagination has us playing with the boundaries. Of course, solutions to problems look rational, but with hindsight, the process of arriving at these solutions is often not.
Asking the right questions is essential to finding the right solutions.
Guy Kawasaki relates the following story about an innovation that we take for granted today.
Kenichi Ohmae, former director of the Tokyo office of McKinsey & Company, came up with the right question that led to a new class of photographic equipment called the ‘point-and-shoot’ camera. The prevailing high flyers were SLR cameras; this was in the 1970s. The mass of camera manufacturers were operating on positive feedback. This meant they focused on creating better and better SLR cameras: The niche had become a rut.
But Ohmae upset the status quo by asking two pertinent questions:
■ “Why do people take pictures in the first place?”
■ “What are they really looking for when they take pictures?”
His brilliant insight: What people really wanted were good pictures, not good cameras. Pursuing his hunch, Ohmae and his crew analysed a sample of 18,000 pictures at a film lab.
Their findings as to why pictures turned out bad were:
■ poor distance adjustment
■ insufficient light
■ incorrect f-stop settings (to match the film in the camera; speed and type were being ignored, and people had arbitrary f-stop settings).
It was human error, in fact, that caused pictures to turn out bad.
Ohmae’s right questions spurred camera manufacturers to create cameras that delivered what their customers desired: Good pictures minus the hassles! The point-and-shoot camera was born. Customers desire clear and immediate benefits, not razzmatazz features. Asking the right questions led to addressing the right issues.
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."
~ Naguib Mahfouz, 97, Egyptian novelist and Nobel Laureate
[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from 'Surfing the Intellect: Building Intellectual Capital for a Knowledge Economy', by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are th eintellectual property of Dilip Mukerjea.]
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