Paul Sloane is speaking at keynote speaker Kevin Kelly’s Sell Your Story conference. “There was a man in prison, high-security prison, and everything was very tightly controlled. His wife wrote him. She said should I plant the potatoes in the garden now dear? He wrote back to her. He said, “Whatever you do don’t touch the garden that’s where I’ve hidden the guns.” She wrote him a little later and she said, “A van full of policemen came into the house, they dug up the whole garden but they didn’t find anything.” He wrote back “Now is the time to plant the potatoes.” Now that’s lateral thinking in action and lateral thinking in business is about finding a new way to solve a customer’s problem to do something useful to find a different approach.
A young man went to a conference in Paris in 2009 and he couldn’t get a taxi, that was the problem and what most of us would think, well the answer is we’ll catch the Metro, we’ll catch the bus, we’ll walk or wait for a taxi. He thought no is there a better way, could I harness the capacity of all the drivers in Paris he’d be prepared to give me a lift if I paid them something. A man named Travis Kalanick founded Uber, the fastest-growing startup in the world by taking lateral thinking approach a different approach.”
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