Gabor George Burt

In company of visionary friends: Dame Daphne Sheldrick

This series brings to you the most thought-provoking excerpts from my chats with visionary personalities, as recorded for the Slingshot Living radio show. The conversations reveal valuable wisdom, playful anecdotes and useful advice on how to continuously overstep perceived boundaries for success in your business and your personal life.

Today’s segment features an excerpt from my inspirational chat with Dame Daphne Sheldrick, author, conservationist and one of the world’s foremost expert on elephants — having successfully hand-reared over 130 elephant orphan calves over the last 50 years — the first person ever to achieve this. 

Gabor: How have you been able to extend your childhood fascination and love for animals into a life-long passion?

Dame Daphne:  I think everyone is born with a genuine love for animals, but it’s also exposure at a very young age. I grew up on a farm in the Highlands of Kenya — I was born here — and I of course absolutely love the cats, the dogs the cows the turkeys the ducks the bunny rabbits everything like that. And we also had wild orphans. I had my first wild orphan when I was three years old. I was given responsibility for that little bushbuck and I loved it absolutely to bits. My parents always told me that wild animals are only on loan — they don’t belong, they belong in the wild — and so you have to learn to say goodbye. Because they are only happy fulfilling what they are designed to do in the wild situation as they are programmed for a certain role on earth. And that’s the hardest part about raising the orphans is actually saying goodbye. But the wonderful thing about raising the elephants is that it’s never a goodbye. When they go down to the rehabilitation stations it’s like sending your children to boarding school — which I had to do of course — and then when they go into the wild herds and each one does that in it’s own time and pace they are always welcomed into the wild herds. And that’s what’s so loving and wonderful about the elephants is that they are greeted. And the most extraordinary thing is that somehow the elephants who are now living in the wild — these are ex-orphans that were raised here, grown now and many have their own wild-born calves — but they all know when new ones are on the way and they wait in the yard at the end of the yard for the new ones to arrive. Sometimes even when the keepers at the other end don’t even know yet they are coming because the mobile signal is so poor there. How do the elephants know that? There’s no scientific explanation for that. It’s just one of those very mysterious, amazing perceptions that they have that we as humans lost long ago.

Extracting lessons in creativity from the world of sports

Over the past few weeks I’ve shared examples of defying conventional wisdom via the historic story of the Trojan Horse, the lesser-known example of Ignac Semmelweis from the world of medicine and most recently the example of setting seemingly unrealistic goals from the political arena. This week I jump to the world of sports, an area with rich parallels to business strategy.  Let’s look at the origins of some of the world’s most popular sports, which is a nice way to tie the topic of unconventional thinking back to childhood playing.

Legend has it that during a game of soccer in 1823, William Webb Ellis, a sixteen-year-old student at the Rugby School in England, caught the ball in a moment of spontaneous improvisation and started running with it toward the opponent’s goal line. Thus the game of rugby was born. Running with the ball was officially allowed in 1841, and rugby went on to become the foundation for both American and Australian football.

What about the origin of basketball? This sport had an equally unusual, even oxymoronic beginning. Back in 1891, in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, a young physical education teacher was frustrated by the unusually long and harsh winter, which prevented his students from going outdoors to exercise. He tried to fabricate indoor versions of both lacrosse and soccer, but neither was successful.

So he nailed a peach basket to the balcony at both ends of the school gym and defined the object of the game as throwing a soccer ball into the opposing team’s basket. He divided the students into two teams and made up a few rules. Initially, the ball had to be retrieved from the baskets with the help of a ladder. Basket ball, as it was known back then, was thus conceived, and it went on to become one of the world’s most popular sports—a game invented by combining formerly incompatible, common objects in a new way. Like we did all the time when we were kids. In this instance, an unusually harsh environment was the cradle of invention.

Apply the power of Defying Conventional Wisdom in your business and in your personal life. Grab a copy of my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.

Interview: World business leaders seek to re-ignite their childhood creativity

What’s the connection between systematic creativity and smart strategy? And how can we as adults recapture the limitless creativity we all possessed as children?  

I recently had the pleasure of discussing these ideas from my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life live on ForoTV at the recent WOBI World Business Forum in Mexico City.

Watch the video excerpt from our chat above. Afterwards, you can get started re-imagining your business and your life by tuning into my regular article series in the WOBI magazine and by picking up your own copy of Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.

Blue Ocean Strategy still in the news

Blue Ocean Strategy recently received a host of new accolades, including praise from Business Insider and Russia’s Merchant magazine. Here’s what these publications had to say:

From Business Insider’s “10 books that help leaders keep their skills sharp”:

This breakthrough book is essential for any strategist or entrepreneur who wants to move out of intensively competitive, shark-infested waters and into an opportunity-filled, open ocean.

From Merchant Magazine’s "15 best business books of the last decade in Russia":

In Russia, there are companies that have tried it. Their verdict: "It works."

 

What if you could re-imagine your business? What if you could re-imagine your life?

Interacting with me and applying the Slingshot Framework will enable you to:

• Stretch the boundaries of your business to their broadest extent in order to discover new market spaces of expanded relevance

• Learn to identify consumer ‘pain points’ and to turn them into ‘points of infatuation’

• Embrace the shortcut to meaningful innovation:  Instead of outright invention, simply unlock powerful combinations of existing components

A sample of activities, including recent events, projects and interviews, can be viewed in the Events & Media section.

To find out more on how I can help you, to get more information about seminars, workshops, retreats, advisory or to request me for your upcoming event, get in touch via the 'Email Me' link in the upper left-hand corner.

The New Year is the perfect time to rethink everything

Over the past few weeks I’ve shared examples of defying conventional wisdom via the historic story of the Trojan Horse as well as the lesser-known example of Ignac Semmelweis from the world of medicine. Today, I give you a rousing illustration of challenging conventional wisdom from the realm of politics.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy boldly asserted that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He proclaimed: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

Was President Kennedy delusional? Did he not realize that his statement was illogical, that it had no basis in reality? At the time of his speech, only one American had flown in space (less than a month earlier), NASA had not yet sent a man into orbit, and the technological basis for orchestrating such a mission did not yet exist. Even some NASA employees doubted the feasibility of this ambitious goal. Meeting President Kennedy’s challenge required a remarkable flurry of technological creativity. And guess what? America delivered. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, as the whole world held its breath in amazement, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on it.

Daring to dream big and setting ambitious, seemingly impossible goals are what some of the greatest men in history have done and what visionary business leaders do. Their vision inspires their team to be highly creative, because the targeted goals cannot be met by traditional means. As Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell, expressed it in 2004 at the height of the company’s success: “I set irrational goals (Michael [Dell] and I together), to encourage our team so they don’t think of conventional solutions. If we asked for a 10 or 20 percent increase in productivity, we’d get conventional solutions. But if we ask them to double their productivity, then they have to rethink everything.”

Coincidentally, there is a concept in space exploration called gravitational slingshot, which is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial bodies to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically in order to save fuel, time, and expense. The Mariner 10 probe was the first spacecraft to use the gravitational slingshot effect to reach another planet, slinging past Venus on February 5, 1974, in order to explore Mercury for the first time. Using the gravitational pull of planets to propel spacecraft? Now that seems like a brilliantly novel and unconventional concept!

Enjoying these examples of Defying Conventional Wisdom? You can have them available right at your fingertips in my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.

[Original illustration from Slingshot.]

@Pontifex ordains lifestyle enrichment

In order to flourish, companies and organizations today must understand that they are not in the business of making a certain product or providing a certain service, but rather they offer something much more encompassing, much more fundamental: they are in the business of enriching people’s lives. They are in the business of making people’s lives more fun, more thrilling, simpler, more comfortable, more liberating, safer, more meaningful, more efficient and more harmonious. This seemingly small shift in strategic thinking is huge. It allows companies and organizations to infatuate large groups of consumers and to do so continuously.

You want an inspirational example? How about this one from the news: Pope Benedict recently joined Twitter, and will make his first tweet on December 12th, probably the most anticipated tweet in history. How can this seemingly simple move help to create Slingshot-like lifestyle enrichment for over one billion Catholics worldwide? Here’s how:

Combining already existing yet previously separate elements. Take a very traditional institution like the Catholic church, and combine it with cutting edge social media technology — something that at first seems oxymoronic. Yet on second thought, it seems perfectly fitting, because it creates new value for the target audience.

Turning pain points into infatuation points. An important pain point of Catholics is that they feel too far removed from the head of their church. Another is that religious connectivity is too infrequent and regulated — in the form of weekly church services. So the Pope’s presence on Twitter turns these points into points of infatuation as believers are all the sudden directly connected with the head of the church, and they can get words of wisdom and inspiration from him on a continuous basis.

Broadened relevance. The church is seen as less relevant by new generations. By having a presence on Twitter, the Pope immediately expands his relevance and audience to a young generation that is growing up on social media. In fact, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Msgr. Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications notes that there’s “ ‘No doubt that Twitter has precious characteristics that we are interested in,’ notably that 40% of its 140 million active accounts are held by 18- to 34-year-olds.”

[Image via Wall Street Journal.]

Are you trapped in conventionality?

Last week as an example of defying conventional wisdom I shared the story of the Trojan Horse. This week I continue to explore the power of unconventional thinking via a lesser-known example from the medical world, which I learned as a schoolboy growing up in Budapest, that also serves to highlight the often prevalent resistance to new ideas.

In the mid-nineteenth century, mortality rates among women giving birth were terribly high in Europe, oscillating between 10 and 35 percent, primarily due to puerperal fever (childbed fever). In 1847, Ignac Semmelweis, a twenty-nine-year-old Hungarian physician working at a hospital in Vienna, noticed that the doctors’ ward had three times the mortality rate of the ward run by midwives. Intrigued and determined, his inquiry led him to a deceptively simple explanation: because of their multitasking with diverse patients and even cadavers, doctors’ hands were the carriers of infectious disease, and therefore needed to be washed before handling births. Once his suggestion was insti- tuted, the hospital’s mortality rate dropped from 18 to 1 percent!

But that was not enough to convince his contemporaries. Even though Semmelweis is now considered a medical pioneer and the “savior of mothers,” his peers rejected his findings for their sheer simplicity and inconsistency with prevailing views of disease. The Wikipedia article on Semmelweis notes: “The so-called Semmelweis reflex or effect is a metaphor for a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms —  named after Semmelweis whose perfectly reasonable hand-washing suggestions were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries.”

You can find more examples of Defying Conventional Wisdom in my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.

The value in skipping class

Regular readers of my blog know that education is a subject I am passionate about, presenting ideas for innovation and change through recent posts like Getting teachers and students to “think” and Exchanging diplomas for badges and even in my book, Slingshot.

As a follow up, today I share with you an article that tells the story of a handful of young “academic dissenters” who are defying the traditional education path in favor of making the world their classroom.

Via the New York Times:

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to “hacking” higher education. Inspired by billionaire role models, and empowered by online college courses, they consider themselves a D.I.Y. vanguard, committed to changing the perception of dropping out from a personal failure to a sensible option, at least for a certain breed of risk-embracing maverick.

Risky? Perhaps. But it worked for the founders of Twitter, Tumblr and a little company known as Apple.

[Image via Zaps.]

Gaming on Blue Ocean Strategy

Back in 2006 industry experts chided Nintendo for bringing to market a product whose graphics and display quality looked amateurish. Of course, they were passing judgment on the Wii based on traditional industry standards and could not grasp the transformative power of Nintendo’s unconventional strategy: to de-emphasize graphics and display quality in favor of active sports simulation — a previously unprecedented take on video games. How could these early critics have guessed that the Wii’s seeming amateurishness was a guise for an ingenious industry innovation that would unlock appeal for video games across all consumer demographics?

And so when it was announced that Nintendo would launch a new gaming device, the Wii U, I asked if Nintendo was setting sail for new blue oceans or getting sucked back into red oceans of bloody competition. The initial answer to that question comes to us in the form of early sales figures. Via DailyFinance:

At this early stage, demand isn't the only factor dictating how many consoles are sold. Supply is, too. This means it's likely that more people wanted to buy the Wii U in the first week than those who were able to. The original Wii was in short supply more than a year after it went on sale.

As of Monday afternoon, the website of Best Buy Co. was sold out of the Wii U. Video game retailer GameStop Corp. said there was at least a three day wait for a deluxe Wii U, which costs $350, has more memory and comes with a game called "Nintendo Land." GameStop still had the basic, $300 version available.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter estimates that Nintendo will ship 1 million to 1.5 million Wii Us in the U.S. through the end of January.

[Image via Geek.com.]