The Wizard of Ads: Turning Words into Magic And Dreamers into Millionaires by Roy H. Williams

Author:Roy H. Williams [Williams, Roy H.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wizard Academy Press
Published: 2012-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

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A Lateral Transfer of Knowledge

HEN A BUSINESS OWNER comes up with a new way to look at his business and it makes him a millionaire, you can be sure of one thing: the new idea isn’t really new at all. The business owner has simply borrowed an already proven concept from a parallel but unrelated industry.

As Henry walks through a meat-packing house in Chicago, he sees that each of the butchers has a single, specialized function. Dividing a complex and tedious process into a series of specialized tasks is nothing new in the meat-packing business, but it is a revolutionary concept to Henry. He transfers the idea from meat packing to automaking, and it makes him one of the richest men in the world.

Hundreds of automakers were building cars long before Henry Ford built his first, but none of them ever saw a connection with meat packing. For more than thirty years, these automakers built cars one at a time and never looked for a better way, because “this is how everyone does it.”

Henry Ford had the audacity to look at the auto industry and say, “Maybe everyone is wrong.” Einstein looked at time and space and said, “Maybe everyone is wrong.” Louis Pasteur looked at disease and said, “Maybe everyone is wrong.” Columbus looked at the horizon and said, “Maybe everyone is wrong.” Galileo looked at the stars and said, “Maybe everyone is wrong.” Yet not one of these men began with a blank sheet of paper. Each of them was intrigued, inspired, and guided by the observations of others. Isaac Newton may have spoken for them all when he said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

Are you a good listener? Are you a thoughtful observer? Do you have respect for the fundamental worth of everything you see? Do you have the humility to accept that you may be wrong? It is an audacious humility indeed that says, “Perhaps we have been wrong all along.”

Henry Ford was a miserable father and an arrogant tyrant, but somewhere beneath this brittle exterior, Henry possessed the humility to believe he could learn valuable things from a meat cutter.

It was this humility that made Henry his fortune.

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