THE
MILLION
DOLLAR
PARROT
25 BRIEF STORIES
FOR BIG BREAKTHROUGHS
Copyright © 2012
by Gerald de Jaager and by James Ericson,
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0689-3
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
Bergen Publishing
Minnetonka, Minnesota, USA
To purchase a printed version of this book,
please visit www.milliondollarparrot.com.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
“Insight lasts; theories don’t. And even insight decays into small details, which is how it should be. A few details that have meaning in one’s life are important.” —Peter Drucker
“To do things differently, we must learn to see things differently. Seeing differently means learning to question the conceptual lenses through which we view and frame the world, our businesses, our core competencies, our competitive advantage, and our business models. It means finding new eyeglasses that will enable us to see strategies and structures taking shape, even if we feel that we are on the edge of chaos; it is a matter of survival in the new world of business.” —John Seely Brown
Introduction
Here you will find twenty-five brief stories that can help you think about your world differently. They’re metaphors; they’re thought-starters—we call them new lenses because they enable you to see familiar things in new ways.
The lenses can be temporary ways of turning on your fullest creativity as you do some especially important thinking, or they may create new perspectives that will permanently affect how you view things. They will lead to positive differences in the way you think and act—as a leader, as an innovator, and perhaps as a person.
Throughout an organization, they elevate the creativity and energy that individuals and teams bring to solving problems and finding opportunities. Moreover, because the titles of the lenses quickly become a shared, easily-recalled shorthand for important concepts, conversations about those concepts flourish more readily and are sustained more easily, embedding the search for better ideas into the everyday life of the organization.
In more than twenty years heading The Masters Forum, we hosted presentations by more than 150 of the world’s preeminent business thinkers.1 Those exceptional men and women generally offer insightful solutions to organizational issues. We refer to many of their ideas in this book, but we take a different approach that is complementary to theirs, offering these lenses as twenty-five distinctive ways to help you find your own best ideas for any kind of issue you might be facing.
We believe that on your own you’ll see plenty of applications for the lenses, from finding deep insights to simply perking up meetings. The primary benefits from using them arise from insights that are sparked, questions that are asked, constructive new conversations that probably would not have occurred otherwise, and the establishment of a shared vocabulary for new thinking. Openness to where they can take you is the most important quality for gaining the most from them.
Start anywhere. Something is bound to click, and soon you’ll be seeing things in new ways that can yield great returns.
“Insight lasts; theories don’t.”
— Peter Drucker2
“If you get outside your own autobiography, you can learn. Animals learn only from their own experience; human beings can learn from the experiences of others, particularly if they can get outside their own head, their agenda, their background, their motive structure, and into the heads of other people.” —Stephen Covey3
“I’m not yet as much of a learning person as I’d like to be. Like most Americans, I’m driven largely by an urge to perform, accomplish, achieve, and get things done. Yet as I begin to consciously shift to filtering everything through a learning lens, I find both dramatic and subtle differences in the way I do things and how I spend my time.” —Jim Collins4
The Scent on the Floor
What you leave behind can help you or it can hurt you.
When Estée Lauder retired in 1994 as head of the cosmetics company that bears her name, she commanded a privately-held business empire that controlled 45 percent of the cosmetics market in American department stores, employed more than 10,000 people in 118 countries, and registered annual sales exceeding four billion dollars. Quite a journey for the woman born Josephine Esther Mentzer in New York City, who according to Time magazine “stalked the bosses of New York City department stores until she finally got some counter space at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1948.”5
As her company grew, Lauder decided to expand internationally. In 1960, she succeeded in opening its first overseas outlet in one of London’s top department stores, Harrods. From there, she anticipated success throughout Europe. “If I could start with the finest store in London, all the other great stores would follow,” she said.6
But Paris was to prove more challenging than London. The perfume buyer at Galeries Lafayette, Paris’s most prestigious department store, was disdainful of this upstart American woman with the made-up French-sounding first name. He refused even to meet with her.
After trying fruitlessly for several days to obtain an appointment, Lauder took matters into her own hands. She walked into the perfume section of Galeries Lafayette, uncapped a bottle of Youth Dew (her company’s most successful perfume), turned it over, and emptied it onto the carpet.
Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn reported what happened next in her book, Brand New:
Over two days, shoppers repeatedly asked Galeries Lafayette saleswomen where they could purchase the scent. Some of these conversations took place in the presence of the store’s cosmetics buyer, who was impressed with women’s enthusiasm for Youth Dew. Within a few weeks, Estée Lauder opened her first counter in Galeries Lafayette.7
