| What
Went Right? Bringing
Breakthrough Ideas to Life
 What
is a breakthrough? Something that wouldn't have happened
anyway.
People
at these organizations learned that one idea really can make
a difference. They also had the support to bring their discoveries
to life. Whether they're intended to save money, increase
revenue or make life easier, breakthrough ideas are often:
Simple,
yet immensely successful...
In
a meeting, a Bank One employee asked, "Where do the people
who get turned down for loans go?" The answer was, "Across
the street to another bank or to a finance company."
Her second question was, "Doesn't Bank One have a finance
company?" The answer was "yes" - and
the bank began sending these people to its finance company.
Bank One also had a credit card company; so the people who
were turned down for credit cards or who were behind in their
payments were also called by the finance company. Now, customers
benefit by consolidating their bills with lower interest home
equity loans, by making lower monthly payments, and by deducting
the annual interest charges on their tax forms. And Bank One
benefits by booking more than $200 million in new loans annually.
All because someone bothered to ask a couple of simple questions.
Unanticipated...
Consider
the maintenance worker at Japan Railways East who discovered
a great-tasting mineral water while drilling a bullet-train
tunnel through Mount Tanigawa. Although others sought to drain
the liquid off, the worker convinced management to test, and
eventually market, the mineral-rich beverage, launching an
entirely new product line that sold $60 million in 1997.
Bigger
than they first seem...
An
American Airlines flight attendant knew that it was standard
procedure to stock ten plastic coffee pot lids on every flight,
even though about half of those lids ended up in the trash.
Realizing the tremendous waste, the employee suggested reducing
the stock to just five. While the 1.5-cent savings per lid
seemed negligible at first, the idea was worth more than $62,000
over the 840,000 or so AA flights each year.
Self-initiated...
Who
would have thought that a part-time worker at the Massachusetts
Department of Public Welfare in 1991 would discover a way
to bring an additional $200 million into the state each year?
Although it wasn't part of her regular job, the employee found
a way to get more Federal Medicaid funds to reimburse hospitals
with disproportionately high uncompensated care costs, taking
this financial burden off the state. By 1997, the windfall
had exceeded $1.4 billion in new state funds.
Happy
accidents...
Just
before Christmas in 1965, a research scientist working on
a new anti-ulcer drug brought an unexpected gift to pharmaceutical
company G.D. Searle and Co. After a series of mishaps caused
the chemical he was heating to boil and spatter onto his bare
hands, the researcher licked his finger without thinking and
discovered an extremely sweet taste. It took some convincing
and more than 16 years of tests for the drug company to market
the new sweetener. Today NutraSweet is a billion-dollar
product.
Success
from failure...
A
3M chemist had an inspiration at church one Sunday when the
slips of paper he used to mark passages in his prayer book
kept falling out. Recalling a failed experiment by a colleague
who had tried to create a super-strong adhesive but produced
a super-weak one instead, the chemist began testing the compound
on pieces of note paper. Finding a formula that would allow
the paper to stick and peel off, the idea was presented to
management and became the blockbuster product Post-It Notes.
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