Hi Reader

In 1979, Akio Morita was about to release a portable cassette player with no recording function and headphones-only output. The market research was unanimous: people wanted recording. Buyers wouldn't pay for listening they couldn't share. Sony's own engineering team thought it was a mistake.

Morita shipped it anyway. The Walkman sold over 400 million units across its lifespan and created a category that didn't exist before he forced it into the world.

A bad idea, according to everyone who measured it.

Samuel Langley had a Smithsonian budget, a War Department contract, and the entire aeronautical establishment behind him.

Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, beat him to powered flight by nine days.

The Wright brothers understood something Langley didn't…simply because they came from cycling. An aircraft, like a bicycle, has to be balanced laterally while it's moving. The aviation establishment treated flight as a power problem but in contrast the Wrights treated it as a balance problem.

The bicycle shop turned out to be the better laboratory than the Smithsonian.

Toy Story 2 was in production in 1998 and it was terrible. Pixar's Braintrust, a small group of directors who held no formal authority over each other's films, said so in a room with John Lasseter. Direct, specifically and without suage-coating. They said the script was broken and the film couldn't be rescued without rebuilding it from the ground up.

Pixar rebuilt it in nine months. The film opened at number one and still sits on the list of highest-rated animated sequels ever made.

The rules of that room were simple. The Braintrust could be as harsh as they wanted. The director had to listen. And the director was not obligated to take a single note.

That third condition, the least stand-out, is what most companies who try to copy the format quietly miss.

So, it might not be obvious that here we have three pictures of the same thing.

The first says the people closest to the data are sometimes the furthest from the answer.

The second says the answer often arrives from a discipline that wasn't supposed to be relevant.

The third says the room has to be designed so the difficult voice can speak, and so the person it lands on can't outrank it.

Most founders I work with engineer the opposite. The sales decisions go through advisors who measure too much. The commercial hires come from inside the category the founder is already failing in. The rooms get designed to keep the difficult or challenging voice off the agenda before it reaches a meeting.

Then they’re head-scratching when their commercial function never finds its breakthrough.

Most start-up founders & business leaders are still waiting for the breakthrough to find them.

You've already met yours.

You just didn't like how it looked.

​www.paulclarke.ie​

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Thank you for being part of this community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke https://www.paulclarke.ie Connect with me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulclarkeperform/​

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