What Are Your Friends Teaching You?
Thoughts precede actions. Our thoughts color our words. Our words influence others.
A remarkable group of people decided to meet regularly to share ideas. Among them were Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Charles Lindbergh. They would go away to a quiet retreat for several days and talk about what was going on in the world and how they might want to think differently.
They met during good times and during hard times. They had all experienced first hand the impact of the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Still, they looked for two things: 1) what opportunities exist? and, 2) how can those opportunities be addressed?
Is this the way we should be thinking right now?
Following one of these sessions, Henry Ford accompanied Thomas Edison back to Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. Edison had some new ideas Ford wanted to see. While sitting in Edison's office, one of his engineers came in and gave a detailed report about why one of Edison's latest ideas could not be built. It was technologically impossible to make the thing do what Edison wanted it to do. Even if it were possible people would never embrace it, it would be too fragile to survive in the consumer market, and on and on.
Edison listened, stared at the details and then said, "Build it anyway".
Months later, Ford was sitting in his office when one of his engineering teams came in to report that one of Ford's pet projects could not be built. It was technologically impossible and they had the detailed reasons why.
You know how Ford responded, right? "Build it anyway."
Edison's idea was a phonograph record - a disk rather than the popular cylinder most people were using. It would require consumers to buy a different player and to embrace a whole new concept. This basic format became the standard until the twenty-first century when CDs gave way to MP3.
Ford's idea was a "shiftless" transmission which we now refer to as an automatic transmission. His potential market expanded immediately and dramatically when people who had difficulty coordinating the clutch and accelerator were able to drive without having to shift gears manually.
Who are your friends and what are they teaching you?
In the movie, "Apollo 13", the engineers are sequestered in a room trying to figure out how to develop an air-handling system for a capsule orbiting in space using only the tools, materials and capabilities in the space craft. Several times they reported that it was impossible. However, in the tradition of other great minds, the theme became, "Failure is not an option."
Salespeople: your customers are struggling and dragging their feet; sell anyway.
Leaders: business is tough and the odds may seem impossible; take your people forward anyway.
Think big and surround yourself with big thinkers. Be known as someone whose thinking challenges the thinking of others including you. Know that you are planting seeds in the minds of others - what will you plant today?
"Call Me, ask Me and I will tell you what great and wonderful things are going to happen here, things you know not."
Jeremiah 33:3 
