THE POPE & THE TAILOR
Once a tailor, while on a visit to Rome, was fortunate enough to be granted an audience with the Pope. Upon his return home, he told his best friend of his memorable visit. His friend, not surprisingly, wanted as many details as possible. “What was His Holiness like?” queried his friend. “About a 41 Long, I’d say,” answered the tailor.
The point of the story is this: specialists tend to see the world through their own specialties. Tailors tend to see people as coat sizes. Advertising people tend to see all problems as fixable with the next great ad campaign.
So be careful when soliciting the advice of specialists. Often they exclude or just plain don’t see solutions that are beyond their specialty. The antidote? Turn instead (or additionally) to generalists—open-minded folks not tied to a particular specialty. This will give you a more rounded (and likely) more elegant list of solutions, some of which the “specialists” would deem as irrelevant, impractical or even as impossible.
In all likelihood, it is exactly those solutions that are most likely to help you “jump to the next curve.”
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