Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author, spoke Wednesday morning at HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference and it was epic. He talked about innovation and change in business. He stressed how reframing our perspective is absolutely critical for creating opportunities, having successful business ideas and taking on new strategies.
Gladwell told a story to start off his keynote. It went a little something like this [this is a long story short kind of thing.]
Before the 1950s this guy, Malcom McLean, got into the shipping industry. He bought a truck, bought another truck and eventually grew within 15-20 years to a couple hundred trucks. The only thing is every time something had to be shipped overseas, that truck was unloaded and the items were put onto the ship. The process doubled the shipping time.
Seeing that so much time was being wasted in the transferring process McLean decided to look at things from a new perspective. In 1956 McLean invented and commercialized shipping containers that double as truck trailers. He was the first in his industry to modernize the overseas shipping concept. He figured out how to ultimately get the cost down and reframed the entire industry. Definitely a successful business idea!
History lesson aside, this brief glimpse of a business man in the past shows that ones perspective on something allows one to see opportunities OR it hides opportunities behind your blind spots.
At Half a Bubble Out we use our outside perspective and strategies to help create a different perspective for our clients so that they have an ability to see opportunity within their company that doesn’t exist yet and can be created with a couple of changes or shifts in their own strategy. We also help them discover opportunities that are there that they just didn’t see because they had a different perspective on the topics, strategy or issue.
The shipping industry was completely changed because of a reframing. It takes a different type of perspective to reframe a business, company, industry, etc.
One of our fairly new clients who manages an organization that extends to 200 remote locations in 4 different states realized that their entire communication has been lost over the past 10 years upon recently taking over the position. In the midst of our first session with him he started having insight into things within the company that he hasn’t noticed before because we gave him new facts and figures and perspectives. This reframed the entire situation so that all of a sudden he found relevance and purpose in the midst of what he was doing.
Having reframing allows you to leverage what you are doing and help manage and create positive change within your business. Sometimes all it takes is an outsider’s perspective and view of things to have clarity in what you are doing and the changes that need to be made.
Reframing an idea, an industry or a business is definitely a process. It’s one that requires outside help, lots of work and time.
"In successful attempts of transformation you'll see an act of re-framing the problem that makes the solution possible; erasing existing boundaries and starting from scratch," Gladwell said.
"(Entrepreneurs) have the imagination to understand how to change the world."
If you would like help reframing your business or just need some help seeing things from a different perspective, we understand your needs and can help.
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