Debate: You should think independently to solve problems

Geniuses think about problems from multiple perspectives

Globalization has accelerated the "four major shifts": the great transfer of power, the great transfer of talents, the great transfer of wealth, and the great transfer of ideas. In a world where development is becoming increasingly uneven, the future belongs only to those with “ideas.” Hegel said - Man stands up by his thoughts. The business world has always said that if you are not afraid of not being able to do it, you are afraid of not being able to think of it. The "Ariadne's Colored Thread" we are looking for is a clue to business wisdom and a clue that allows you to think about problems from multiple angles. A clue, a clue that prompts you to leap forward. Business wisdom is first of all business innovation, and business innovation is first of all management of our way of thinking. Some experts and scholars who study the creative process believe that there are at least eight ways of thinking that distinguish geniuses from ordinary people. These eight ways of thinking are: unquenchable creative passion; thinking about problems from multiple perspectives; genius thinking about problems from opposite perspectives; genius making original combinations; genius trying to establish connections between things; genius being good at metaphors; genius being interested in change. Prepared; genius visualizes his thoughts. Since human thinking activity is an integrated process, in creative activities such as scientific invention, artistic creation, and business planning, these eight ways of thinking often work simultaneously and interact with each other.

For those scientific giants and artistic geniuses in history, their primary thinking strategy was to think about, research, and solve problems from multiple angles. A common characteristic of outstanding figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, and Freud is that they often reconstruct all aspects of the problems they encounter from different perspectives. Likewise, in the global market, many business geniuses, such as Mrs. Chandler, Ted Turner, Michael Dell, and Jeff Bewkes, have created markets that consumers did not know before. Whether they are scientists, artists or entrepreneurs, these talented people are good at thinking about problems from multiple perspectives. They feel that the first angle they look at a problem is too biased towards their usual way of looking at things, and they will constantly switch from one angle to another to reframe the problem. Their understanding of the problem gradually deepened with each change of perspective, and they finally grasped the essence of the problem. Einstein's theory of relativity is an explanation of the relationship between different perspectives. Freud's method of psychoanalysis aimed to find details that did not fit traditional methods in order to discover a completely new perspective. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Dell have developed some unprecedented new business models from a new perspective.

The key to why China lags behind in innovation lies in the so-called social elite, who often start from a traditional perspective and are trapped in the "jurisdiction of replicative thinking." We might as well take a look. From the most traditional agriculture to the most avant-garde television media, their industries are completely different. The operators are even more different in terms of cultural education, social status, etc.! But even though they are two unrelated groups, their thinking patterns are basically the same. For example, in a country like ours that is dominated by agriculture, intensive farming has been the treasure of traditional agriculture since ancient times. However, it is now found that plowing can also damage soil fertility and increase soil erosion. Furthermore, plow-free land is generally better for the planet. Because unploughed land can tightly control carbon, otherwise when organic matter rots, the carbon will run into the air to form carbon dioxide. If one hectare of land is not tilled, it can absorb one ton of carbon every year, which can make the land Become a key factor in curbing global warming. However, in this industry where traditional concepts dominate our industry, every household is still keen on intensive farming. Otherwise, it is not enough to reflect the hard-working spirit passed down from our ancestors. To this day, when we see that millions of Latin Americans no longer use plows to plow their fields, people still plow as before.

Looking at our TVs, China has more than 4,000 TV stations from central to local levels, in addition to fifty or sixty satellite TV stations, ranking first in the world in terms of number! However, they do what only one station can do.

A program host can guest star on dozens of TV stations to repeatedly host programs with almost the same content; a TV series is released on multiple satellite TV stations at the same time, and can be broadcast day after day in rotation across the country; a type of TV series ( "Jin Da Xia", "Aunt Qiong" or dramas involved in the case) can be performed forever; the same song can be sung from city to city; a party format can be praised for one or twenty years and be passed down... They are making money While taking a lot of advertising money, they are wasting national resources. If farmers in thousands of households can still create value by doing the same thing, then what value can other TV sets create in thousands of households besides creating an audience of fools? Should we question contemporary cultural elites about who is responsible for the quality of our spiritual lives? Who is responsible for our extravagant waste?

It is precisely because the government and enterprises are accustomed to the "replicative thinking mode" that today China has become a country with a large output value but a small profit. From the primary industry to the fourth industry, my country has more than 100 products that rank first in the world in output, such as steel with the first output value, first in clocks, first in clothing, first in shoes, and first in tea. , No. 1 porcelain... and so on. But in terms of profit ranking, it is playing the bottom role. In terms of shoes, which ranks first in output value, 4.072 billion pairs were exported in 2001, valued at US$10.096 billion, with an average of less than US$2.5 per pair. Every year, 1.4 billion pairs are exported to the United States alone, but they still can’t exchange for a “Titanic”. I hope that the shoe burning incident in Spain in 2004 can break the bosses of China's shoe industry from the trap of "replicative thinking mode". The replicative way of thinking, looking at problems from a single fixed perspective, is a "death instinct complex"; studying problems from multiple angles is a kind of "life instinct complex", which dominates the "innovative way of thinking".

Studying problems from multiple perspectives is the beginning of "innovative thinking". The idea of ??changing the lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge in the United States is an obvious example. After the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, the traffic jam situation became worse instead of improving. The management department spent tens of millions of dollars to solicit solutions from the public. As a result, the winning solution was surprisingly simple: make the isolation barrier in the middle of the bridge movable - according to the direction of the flow of people commuting to and from get off work, it is stipulated to move to the left in the morning One lane, one lane to the right in the afternoon. As a result, the clogging problem was solved. Obviously, the bridge is "dead" (it cannot be widened at will), but from another perspective, people are "alive", and we can turn fixed lanes into "movable" lanes. This method has since been widely used all over the world, and the results are very good. The traffic jam problem on Siping Road in Shanghai is a typical case where it has been successfully used.

Look at it from another angle - garbage is a treasure misplaced. In 1974, the Statue of Liberty in the United States was demolished and renovated, and the garbage piled up like a mountain. At that time, the government issued a public tender to clean up the accumulated garbage. Because New York State has very strict regulations on garbage disposal, not only can it not make money, but it may also attract complaints from the environmental protection department, so many transportation companies are discouraged. The chairman of McCall's Company, who was traveling in France at the time, rushed to New York immediately after hearing the news. After seeing the mountains of scrap copper and iron piled under the Statue of Liberty, he immediately signed and bought it. He had scrap copper melted and cast into a small Statue of Liberty; cement blocks and wood were processed into a base; scrap lead and scrap aluminum were made into the key to the New York Plaza. Finally, he even used the scraps swept from the Statue of Liberty. The dust is packaged and sold to florists. This Jew who came out of the Auschwitz concentration camp turned this pile of garbage into 3.5 million US dollars in cash, and he just doubled the price of copper per pound by 10,000 times - achieving the goal that his father set for him 28 years ago. Target. In 1946, McCall came to the United States with his father and started a copperware business in Houston. One day, his father asked him how much a pound of copper cost. McCall said 35 cents. The father said, "Yes, the whole state of Texas knows that the price of a pound of copper is 35 cents, but as a Jewish son, he should say $3.50. Try making a pound of copper into a door handle and see."

In fact, similar examples abound, and they are not the “business patent” of Jews. There was Wang Honghuai in Shenyang, who was a rag picker. One day he wanted to make a fortune. He only made a few cents from a can. If he melted it and sold it as metal, he might be able to make "big money". So he tried to melt one, and it turned into a piece of silver-gray metal the size of a fingernail. He spent 600 yuan to have it tested, and the technician told him that it was a very valuable aluminum-magnesium alloy.

Wang Honghuai did some calculations and found that the price of aluminum ingots on the market at that time was between 14,000 yuan and 18,000 yuan per ton. Selling materials would make six or seven times more money than selling scrap products. So he founded a metal recycling processing factory. In order to attract people to sell empty cans, he raised the price of each can from a few cents to a dime and a quarter. In this way, he smelted more than 240 tons of aluminum ingots from empty cans in one year. He earned 2.7 million yuan in the first three years alone and became a millionaire from a "scavenger". Hilton, the overlord of the world’s hotel industry, once said, “A piece of pig iron worth $5 can be worth $10.50 when cast into a horseshoe. If it is made into an industrial magnetic needle, it is worth more than $3,000. When turned into a watch spring, its value is As much as 250,000 US dollars." According to Hilton's thinking, Wang Honghuai will not stop at the "metal recycling processing plant", and the future is promising.

It is really necessary to look at the problem from another angle. Chinese media loses money without advertising; while HBO in the United States deliberately does not advertise but makes a lot of money. When most mass media in China and around the world cannot make money or survive without advertising, HBO, known as the best TV station in the world, does not do any advertising, but it is the most profitable and popular in the United States. It is also the largest cable TV station. Since its launch in November 1972, it now has 28 million viewers and a turnover of 2.1 billion euros (profit of up to 585 million euros), and has established numerous branch channels. The TV series and movies it produced, such as "Elephant", "Angels in America", "Band of Brothers", etc., have won international awards and become the most watched and popular works. Its head, Jeff Bewkes, does the same thing from a different angle. His insistence on breaking conventions and not being restricted is the key to his success.

Michael Dell believes that "Success does not depend to a large extent on ability, but on whether you are willing to look at things you are familiar with from a different angle." Just because of changing the angle, He found that there were so many intermediate links from "product → commodity". He decided to skip the intermediate links and "reach directly" to consumers. While saving costs, he adopted a new "direct" model, which also created conditions for "batch customization" and "network marketing". The new DELL "direct marketing" model founded in 1984 made Dell a great success. Ten years later, its stock market value reached US$10 billion, and its stock price increased 296 times. An online store was established in July 1996. The "store" received more than 2 million customers per week and sold US$14 million in products and services every day. In 1999, it launched a global strategic alliance and currently has 120 strategic partners, including Microsoft. , Novell, SAP and other world's top companies in various fields; as of 2002, Dell Computer's global market share has risen to 15%, with sales of US$31 billion and profits of US$1.8 billion. It forced HP and Compaq to join forces, and then those upstarts forced IBM out of the PC retail market. In 2004, after years of losses, IBM finally completely transferred the PC business to China's Lenovo Group. As competition winner Michael Dell explained his success, he said: “My company is proof that we can see opportunities that our competitors don’t want to see and think don’t exist, and profit from those opportunities. ”

In fact, if you think about it from another angle, everyone can be “Dell”. Dell himself has repeatedly said, "To think differently from others, you don't have to be a genius, or even a highly educated expert." In fact, he himself is a college dropout. The key is that you have to get rid of the "copy thinking" stereotype. It is said that there was a famous doctor named Ye Tianshi in the Qing Dynasty of China. Once, when he was treating a patient with pink eye disease, he found that the patient was worried about his eye disease. That is to say, your eye disease only needed to take a few medicines. But your feet will develop a malignant sore in seven days, which could be life-threatening if not done properly. When the man heard this, he was shocked and asked urgently for a way to cure the sores... Ye Tianshi asked him to massage the soles of his feet for seven days and gave him a secret recipe passed down from his ancestors. The man thanked him profusely and left. After returning home, he did not dare to slack off as the doctor ordered. Sure enough, seven days later, no sores appeared on his feet, and his eye disease was cured. When he went to say thank you, Ye Tianshi told the truth. It turned out that the sores on his feet were just to deceive him and distract him.

Subvert the tradition and change the perspective to innovate. There are many opportunities - Barbie innovates the toy industry.

Mrs. Chandler created Barbie because she changed her perspective and transformed the "doll" that had always been left to children to play with, into an "idol" that has a date with children's hearts, thus changing the perception of certain traditional toys in people's minds. status, thus creating a new “selling point”. In 1959, when the Mattel toy company was on the verge of bankruptcy, company founder Ruth Chandler created an adult doll named Barbie after her daughter. It was listed in New York amid strong opposition from shareholders. Surprisingly, 350,000 units were sold that year. Since then, she has been criticized by feminists, and Ruth was kicked out of the company in 1975. However, Barbie, which lasted 48 years, has sold more than 1 billion in 150 countries, with annual sales reaching more than 1 billion US dollars (a record of 1.8 billion US dollars was set in 1998). Barbie has subsequently become a certain kind of fashion culture. It has been rated by the public as "one of the 15 themes that Americans most want to remember in the 1960s." Since then, toy companies from various countries have followed suit (or followed or opposed it). Just like "Coca-Cola", "Harvard Classics" and "Hollywood", "Barbie" has become synonymous with the industry. Currently, globally, Barbie dolls top the industry list at a rate of two sold every second. According to statistics, an American girl owns an average of 8 Barbie dolls, Italy and Japan have 7 Barbie dolls each, and France and Germany have 5 Barbie dolls each.

Virtual characters have become popular idols and even "popular lovers". In order to activate the "character image", Barbie purchases 120 new sets of clothes every year. According to incomplete statistics, in order to make clothes for Barbie and her friends, as of 1999, 100,000 kilometers of materials have been used in the past 40 years, and a total of 1 billion pairs of shoes of all kinds have been sewn for her. . This virtual character has played more than 70 roles, including celebrities, singers, doctors, nurses, teachers, models, stewardesses, hippie girls, racing drivers, athletes, and even dentists. She has transformed from a child's playmate into a popular idol. Its most successful feature is its ability to attract consumers to adopt the same innovative products. Not only children have a special liking for it, but even adults have become fanatical followers, thus making this virtual character a "popular lover". An American girl named Barbara claimed to be able to communicate with Barbie's soul and published a newsletter to report the conversation between them. It is said that Barbie's first words were: "I need respect." A British The girl, in order to look like Barbie, had 12 plastic surgeries.

How can Barbie, 48, stay young forever? The key lies in concept innovation. Operators go against tradition and become idols instead of playmates, thereby creating a brand new market. In order to maintain vitality, they innovate new ideas for combined marketing and launch 12 to 20 series every year. For different consumers, the company designs different "versions", including mass-market products, boutique series, and even "out-of-print" products that are coded and sold in limited quantities. Due to the innovative design, despite the high price, the "out-of-print" style has become a treasure that is eager to be collected. Nowadays, collecting various Barbie versions has gradually become fashionable. There is a 30-year-old male primary school teacher in Taiwan. When he was visiting a department store in Taichung in 1999, he saw the newly launched "Vera King Bride Barbie" and was impressed by its exquisite and gorgeous shape, so he started collecting it. There are nearly a hundred Barbie dolls in various versions, all limited or ultra-limited edition. These include flower language series, model series, retro series, artist series, world series, etc. Among them, the most exquisite series is priced at more than NT$20,000.

The reason why Barbie dolls are so popular around the world is largely due to the series of marketing they implemented. Although a single product may be perfect, if there is no "stars over the moon" and "green leaves reflecting each other", consumers are likely to abandon it due to "aesthetic fatigue". Therefore, how to continuously maintain the "freshness" of flagship products is a new marketing topic. The series operation implemented by Mattel around Barbie not only greatly enhances the added value of the product, but more importantly, the series operation allows it to find many more new marketing points than a single product. For example, they not only designed multiple identities for Barbie, but also created numerous character series and animal series with "her" as the core. As part of the Barbie family in the series, she has her boyfriend "Ken", and then has many relatives and friends, including 32 boyfriends, 12 relatives, and 38 kinds of animals... so there are many stories.

As a selling point, the creative team created one incident after another around Barbie. She announced her engagement to her cousin "Ken" at one moment, and then announced that she was determined to break up with "Ken". In order to continue to attract public attention, in 2000, Barbie decided to "run for president" with another doll, Vanessa...

There are hundreds of designers surrounding Barbie, and they continue to give her plastic surgery. Turn some famous public figures into Barbie's faces. This creates a situation where stars are shining over the moon and stars are shining, which is eye-catching in the changes of products. Since 1959, Barbie has always maintained a youthful and beautiful image, curvy and radiant.

On April 27, 2002, Mrs. Chandler, who co-founded the Mattel toy company with her friend Harold Mattson in 1942, died in Los Angeles at the age of 85. The next day, "Efe" had a report saying that Barbie, the queen of dolls, became an "orphan" yesterday. There is no doubt that Barbie is widely accepted as a "character". From the moment Mrs. Chandler created and gave life to Barbie, the "doll" was no longer a toy that could be manipulated at will, but an idol in the minds of children. After nearly half a century of innovative marketing, Barbie has become an industry standard and symbol, just like Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse, and hamburgers, and a powerful part of American culture. The birth of Barbie has attracted countless competitors, challengers and imitators, such as "Yue Sai Doll", "Cabbage Patch Doll" and numerous "Arab Dolls" who are her followers.

Barbie inspiration: There are many opportunities for innovation from a different perspective. Mrs. Chandler created Barbie because she changed her perspective and transformed the "doll" that had always been left to children to play with, into an "idol" that has a date with children's hearts, thus changing the perception of certain traditional toys in people's minds. status, thus creating a new “selling point”. Hollywood also recently released an animated film "Barbie: Swan Lake". Barbie's incarnation, Odette, is a brave girl who comes from an ordinary background. With her courage, wisdom and willpower, she and her friends overcome many difficulties and finally succeed. Defeated the evil forces. Obviously, Barbie has become the undisputed standard in the industry, whether you appreciate it or oppose it

There are many opportunities for innovation from another perspective. In New York, known as the "city that never sleeps", there is a lot of hustle and bustle everywhere, and it is rare to find a quiet corner. A nightclub owner thought, "Why can't I sell silence?" So he created a so-called "silent party". At such parties, people cannot make sounds and can only communicate through writing or body language. Participants at the party either "made eye contact" or folded paper kites and threw them at their favorite people. For a while, they exchanged glasses of wine and the paper kites were flying, and the atmosphere in the venue was extremely pleasant. Just when everyone was hesitant to speak, after two hours of "silence", the host suddenly announced the end of the "silence", and the audience finally "exploded in silence." At this time, the venue was filled with joy, and the lovers embraced each other warmly and cheered loudly, pushing the entire party to a new climax. It is precisely in the noisy metropolis that smart creatives try to find a quiet paradise and start this kind of "silent party". It combines stillness with movement, combines movement with stillness, and combines movement with stillness to complement each other. As a new form of entertainment, it has quietly become popular in New York in recent years.

It’s much fresher from another angle. The hotel industry is probably the oldest industry, and its function is to provide accommodation for travelers. If we look at it from another angle, why can a hotel only be a "place to stay"? From this, it has many functions. Due to a change of perspective, one of the oldest professions may become the most fashionable one overnight. There is a Jules Underwater Hotel 30 feet underwater in John Pennekamp Coral Reef National Park in Key Largo, USA; the David Osman Floating Hotel is built on a river in Alaska 35 miles away from the city, covering an area of 4,500 square feet; in addition, there are life-experience prison hotels in Salisbury, England, and Preston Village, Italy; more innovative “theme hotels”, and other “tree hotels”, "Tent Hotel", "Cinema Hotel", etc. As people's exploration of the universe accelerates, the most luxurious "air hotels" have emerged in recent years. This "Spaceship" is a 400-ton luxury giant spacecraft used to carry passengers. The flying hotel, which is the size of two football fields, floats on 140 million cubic feet of helium, a large amount of electricity, hydrogen fuel propulsion and six turbine engines.

The hotel can carry 250 guests, has a maximum flight speed of 174 kilometers per hour, and can fly as far as 6,000 kilometers. The CSS has a volume of 165×244x647 feet, flying at 8,000 feet in the air, and has a casino, restaurants, special suites, etc.