How to Think Like an Entrepreneur by Philip Delves Broughton

Author:Philip Delves Broughton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250078728
Publisher: Picador

5.  The Slow Hunch

Inventions, even when they seem like flashes of inspiration, emerge from the vast mass of human experience. As knowledge accrues, so do the possibilities of discovering the new. Each generation stands atop a larger body of information and experience. Even the paradigm-shifters who stand a little to one side of the formal way of doing things at least have that formal approach from which to stage their shift. You cannot shift a paradigm which isn’t there in the first place.

This glacial process of invention leading to invention leads us to another way of thinking about the pursuit of opportunity, as a ‘slow hunch’ which evolves in the mind of an entrepreneur over time. The author Steven Johnson has popularized this idea and calls the slow hunch the ‘anti-lightbulb moment’, as it describes an idea which comes into focus over many years.7 He describes the work of Clarence Birdseye, the father of frozen food. In 1912, when Birdseye was twenty-five, he moved his family to Labrador, in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, where he sold furs and pursued his work as a naturalist. In order to feed his young son during the frigid winter, he learned from the local Inuit how to ice-fish, dropping a line through a hole in a frozen lake. He observed that when he pulled out a trout, it froze within seconds of contact with the air. When he thawed it out later, he observed, the fish still tasted fresh. He staged a series of experiments to discover why and found that the secret lay in the speed of the freezing. If you froze food very quickly, you did less damage to it than if you froze it slowly, so it tasted fresher when you eventually thawed it.

When he returned from Labrador to New York, Birdseye joined the Fisheries Association, and was disgusted by the filth and waste of commercial fishing, and decided that freezing might offer an answer. Frozen food was considered unfit even for prison inmates at the time, as freezing technology was so shoddy. It took Birdseye another decade to figure out how to freeze food consistently and at scale so it retained the freshness he found in his Labrador trout. But by the mid 1920s he had cracked it. Shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929, he sold his thriving frozen-food company, General Seafood, for millions. As Johnson points out, all kinds of influences went into Birdseye’s success. His curiosity for nature and willingness to move his wife and newborn son to frozen Labrador; his experience of commercial fisheries; his determination to build a production line inspired by Henry Ford’s factories for the Model T car.

‘Like every idea,’ Johnson writes, ‘Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.’

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