WHAT BOATS ARE YOU NOT SEEING?
It is said that when European discoverers first came to the new world, the natives literally could not see their large masted ships, even though they were moored no more than a hundred yards or so off shore. How could this possibly be? Well, to the natives, their world ended at the shoreline. It was simply not possible for anything to exist beyond it, so even the natives’ wisest members could not see beyond their paradigm.
Now consider how leading business people every day get blind-sided by new competition simply because they are unable to see beyond their own “shoreline.” How did Apple beat Sony to the ipod? How did a 20-year-old college student building computers in his dorm room (Michael Dell) render IBM PCs irrelevant? How did Fred Smith’s C- paper in a Yale business class become the business model for Federal Express? How? By refusing to accept as gospel the prevailing paradigm. By creating a business model that “jumped the curve.”
So how do you avoid being caught in the paradigm trap? For starters, believe that the impossible is (somehow) possible. That the world might not end at the shoreline, as we’ve been taught all these years.
And ask yourself, what boats are you not seeing?
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