A close friend of mine is pregnant and travels frequently for work. She always refuses the full-body scanners and opts for a pat-down instead. She jokes that she’s been felt up in almost every airport in the US. Every time she refuses the full-body scan, the workers insist that it is completely safe. Yeah, that’s what they said about the x-ray machine too.

We know a lot less than we think we know. One mind-boggling example of this is baby formula. In his book “In Defense of Food”, Michael Pollen traces the evolution of baby formula and its frequent missteps.

“Nutrients themselves had been around as a concept and a set of words since early in the nineteenth century. That was when William Prout, an English doctor and chemist, identified the three principal constituents of food — protein, fat, and carbohydrates — that would come to be known as macronutrients. Building on Prout’s discovery, Justus von Liebig, the great German scientist credited as one of the founders of organic chemistry, added a couple of minerals to the big three and declared that the mystery of animal nutrition — how food turns into flesh and energy — had been solved. This is the very same Liebig who identified the macronutrients in soil — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (known to farmers and gardeners by their periodic table initials, N, P, and K). Liebig claimed that all that plants need to live and grow are these three chemicals, period. As with the plant, so with the person: In 1842, Liebig proposed a theory of metabolism that explained life strictly in terms of a small handful of chemical nutrients, without recourse to metaphysical forces such as “vitalism.”

Having cracked the mystery of human nutrition, Liebig went on to develop a meat extract – Liebig’s Extractum Carnis – that has come down to us as bouillon and concocted the first baby formula, consisting of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malted flour, and potassium bicarbonate.

Liebig, the father of modern nutritional science, had driven food into a corner and forced it to yield its chemical secrets. But the post–Liebig consensus that science now pretty much knew what was going on in food didn’t last long. Doctors began to notice that many of the babies fed exclusively on Liebig’s formula failed to thrive. (Not surprising, given that his preparation lacked any vitamins or several essential fats and amino acids.) That Liebig might have overlooked a few little things in food also began to occur to doctors who observed that sailors on long ocean voyages often got sick, even when they had adequate supplies of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Clearly the chemists were missing something—some essential ingredients present in the fresh plant foods (like oranges and potatoes) that miraculously cured the sailors. This observation led to the discovery early in the twentieth century of the first set of micronutrients, which the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, harkening back to older vitalist ideas of food, christened “vitamines” in 1912 (“vita-” for life and “-amines” for organic compounds organized around nitrogen).

Vitamins did a lot for the prestige of nutritional science. These special molecules, which at first were isolated from foods and then later synthesized in a laboratory, could cure people of nutritional deficiencies such as scurvy or beriberi almost overnight in a convincing demonstration of reductive chemistry’s power. Beginning in the 1920s, vitamins enjoyed a vogue among the middle class, a group not notably afflicted by beriberi or scurvy. But the belief took hold that these magic molecules also promoted growth in children, long life in adults, and, in a phrase of the time, “positive health” in everyone. (And what would “negative health” be exactly?) Vitamins had brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain elite segments of the population now began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn’t until late in the twentieth century that nutrients began to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat…

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that, focused so relentlessly as it is on the nutrients it can measure, it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions among foods. So fish, beef, and chicken through the nutritionist’s lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of different fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients happen to be on their scope. Milk through this lens is reduced to a suspension of protein, lactose, fats, and calcium in water, when it is entirely possible that the benefits, or for that matter the hazards, of drinking milk owe to entirely other factors (growth hormones?) or relationships between factors ( fat-soluble vitamins and saturated fat?) that have been overlooked. Milk remains a food of humbling complexity, to judge by the long, sorry saga of efforts to simulate it. The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another: Liebig missed the vitamins and amino acids, and his successors missed the omega-3s, and still to this day babies fed on the most “nutritionally complete” formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, infant formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.”

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, p.20-21, 31-32

We know a lot less than we think we know. Baby formula companies today insist that they have it all figured out. Do they?

How could I not have known about something so interesting? Gartner, the research company, has a set of offerings they call Hype Cycles. You pull up an industry on their website and select the chart you want to see. Unfortunately, you need to be a paying Gartner customer to see them. This is where it helps to work for a large company that has an account with Gartner.

Here’s Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies that I found by searching Bing Images for “Gartner hype cycle”. It’s fascinating to look at the evolution and adoption of the technologies, studied using a framework.

From Gartner:

How Do Hype Cycles Work?

Each Hype Cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s life cycle.

Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.

Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.

Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

“The biggest rule breakers change our processes. They literally change how we work. Sometimes failure can be the inspiration. Who would imagine that being a mediocre typist could make you a millionaire? But for Bette Nesmith, an executive secretary at the Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas in 1951, it was an opportunity waiting to be exploited. Nesmith learned something critical while helping decorate the holiday windows at the bank. The artists corrected their mistakes by painting over the error. Nesmith decided to try the same at work, a telling example of how observation can lead to successful cross-pollination.

Some considered her little swipes of tempura water-based paint “cheating” and one boss warned her not to use the “white stuff” on his letters. But soon Nesmith had a cottage business supplying Mistake Out to fellow secretaries. She renamed the fast-drying, nondetectable fluid Liquid Paper and applied for a patent and trademark. IBM wasn’t interested in buying her business, so Nesmith plowed ahead alone. Within a decade she sold out to Gillette for nearly $50 million – plus royalties.

Those of us who remember the days of typewriting can thank Nesmith for making it possible to finish all those college papers without having to retype the whole page. Nesmith changed how business documents were created. It’s a classic story with a modern connection.”

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley p.243-244

“Remember that innovation stalls with the status quo. Celebrate your team members’ differences. Many years ago one of the most brilliant engineers at Atari was, well, eccentric. He lost his apartment, so he literally moved into the office, taking residence in a makeshift loft that fellow team members built for him. Incredibly, the only entrance was through a conference room. He’d crank away all night, and you’d arrive in the morning to find all the amazing things he’d accomplished. But you couldn’t talk to him till the afternoon when he clambered down from his loft. If you think this sounds bizarre, sometimes that’s how innovation happens. Amazon’s first and most prolific reviewer was practically entombed in books. Every wall of his office was crammed with volumes stretching up to the ceiling. His sleeping bag was tucked under his makeshift desk. He rarely went home.

Hot groups tend to have at least one or two certifiable weirdos. Look around your group or team to get a sense of the different roles people play. Most teams have everything from dramatic leads to character actors, writers, and, yes, directors. Characters round out your company, and we all need a few individuals we’re not sure what to do with.”

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, p.97-98

“Sometimes – if you’re lucky – you can find inspiration for innovation by observing yourself. In many parts of your life, you go through steps so mechanically, so unconsciously, that this is not possible. When you’re off your own beaten path, however, you are more open to discovery: when you travel, especially overseas; when you rent an unfamiliar car; when you try a new sport or experience a new activity. At those times, you are more open to ask the childlike “Why?” and “Why not?” questions that lead to innovation. Whenever you are in that new-to-the-experience mode, I would urge you to pay close attention and even take notes about your impressions, reactions, and questions. Especially the problems, the things that bug you. We call these mental and jotted-down observations “bug lists,” and they can change your life. That’s what happened one day to twenty-six-year-old Perry Klebahn on a visit to a Lake Tahoe ski resort.

Klebahn was recovering from an ankle fracture, and although he could walk without pain, his doctor had warned that skiing was inadvisable. Still wanting to meet his friends for lunch on the slopes, Klebahn discovered that the resort had some snowshoes available to help him traverse the snowy terrain. Using snowshoes for the first time, he was struck by how incredibly awkward they were to use. For one thing, they weighed more than ten pounds, turning what would have been a pleasant walk into serious exercise. On level or uphill terrain, the front of the snowshoes would fill up with snow, making them even heavier and causing you to trip over your own feet. Whenever there was a downhill slope, the shoes were hard to control and would sometimes slip out from under you. All in all, a pretty unpleasant experience, and a product category that had not seen much innovation since Lewis and Clark. A fatalist would have just written off snowshoes as awkward, antiquated equipment, but Klebahn was a Stanford product design student at the time, learning how to sharpen his observation skills, keeping bug lists, and asking a lot of “why?/why not?” questions.

Inspired by observing his own difficulties with the existing technology, Klebahn – while still a student – formed Atlas Snowshoe Company, which almost single-handedly created today’s snowshoe industry. Using a clever design and high-tech materials, he cut the weight of the snowshoes by 70 percent and made them easy to use on any terrain. That left the small task of creating an industry around his new product, but within a few years, Atlas had partnered with ski resorts from Vancouver to Sun Valley in creating snowshoeing areas. Resorts initially worried “if we build one, will they come?” but a single snowshoe area in Vail boasted more than 100,000 visitors by its second season. Perry Klebahn, starting with a single observation, then following up with a lot of creativity and hard work, grew Atlas Snowshoe Company to more than $10 million in sales and then sold the company.

Anecdotal? Yes, but hardly an isolated case. Ask around, and you’ll find that many entrepreneurs got started by observing humans struggling with tired routines and asking themselves what they could do about it.”

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, p.28-30

I have a fascination with companies that make money using creative business models (or standard business models applied creatively). This list of business models comes from Mark Johnson’s book Seizing the White Space (p.131), which teaches large companies how to be innovative. Seeing structure like this applied to different companies in different categories helps me focus my thoughts as I brainstorm companies I would like to start.

Johnson has a slightly different PDF version of this list of business model analogies online here. What business models is his missing?

You can use the bucket method to reframe the question in your favor. Let’s assume that your company’s product is more expensive than a similar offering by one of your competitors. Let’s also assume that there is a good reason behind the higher price. The way the question is phrased is not as important as the answer you have created for the category, which is “price.” A conversation might sound like this:

Customer: Why are you charging 10 percent more for the same product that I can get from company X?

You: You’re asking about price. [Here, "charging more" is the trigger for the answer that you prepared on "price." Although the wording the customer chose is different from the term you chose, it triggers your prepared response on the subject.] We believe our product is priced competitively, especially for a product that improves the bottom line for our clients by 30 percent on average. It’s important to remember that we have the best service team in the industry. That means that when you need support, you’ll get it. Our team is available to you 24-7. None of our competitors can say that.

I know the CEO of a large publicly traded company who uses this method very effectively. For example, during one tough meeting, an analyst asked him to respond to some unfavorable comments made by his largest competitor. “Competition” was his trigger word. The CEO smiled and confidently maintained the high road by saying, “Our view on competition is different from many others. Our view is that you play with class. We compete by giving our customers superior service and sharing our vision for where we see this industry going. As we get more successful, we see more competitors entering the market. It’s part of the process of being a leader.” With this one response, the CEO deflected his competitor’s comments and reframed the issue to focus on his company’s leadership.

When former secretary of state Henry Kissinger was asked how he handled media questions, he said, “What questions do you have for my answers?” He had his answers already prepared. The media is a tough audience, and these days so are your customers. Don’t let uncomfortable questions throw you off your game.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo, p. 192-193

Listeners like lists. But how many points should you include in the list?

Three is the magic number.

Comedians know that three is funnier than two. Writers know that three is more dramatic than four. Jobs knows that three is more persuasive than five. Every great movie, book, play, or presentation has a three-act structure. There were three musketeers, not five. Goldilocks encountered three bears, not four. There were three stooges, not two. Legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi told his players there were three important things in life: family, religion, and the Green Bay Packers. And the U.S. Declaration of Independence states that Americans have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” not simply life and liberty. The rule of three is a fundamental principle in writing, in humor, and in a Steve Jobs presentation.

The U.S. Marine Corps has conducted extensive research into this subject and has concluded that three is more effective than two or four. Divisions within the marines are divided into three: a corporal commands a team of three; a sergeant commands three rifle teams in a squad; a captain has three platoons, and so on. If the marines were kind enough to study this stuff, why should we reinvent the wheel? Go ahead and use it. So few communicators incorporate the rule of three in their presentations that you will stand apart simply by doing so. The rule of three – it works for the marines, it works for Jobs, and it will work for you.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo p. 51-52