DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the question based on it. You won’t…
2024
DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.
You won’t get the great ideas you need from the vice president of strategy or the head of a new product development. They’ve got hurdle rates to consider, budgetary constraints to navigate, and lots of competing claims on their time, attention, and political support. And you definitely can’t wait for great Ideas to come from the CEO. He or she may be at the top of the heap, but that doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to generating the best thinking. By the time most CEOs actually make it to the top, they’re running on intellectual fumes, having already spent their creativity in the jobs they had that propelled them to the top. It’s been a long time since they read, saw, thought, or experienced anything fresh, new, or creative.
So where do great ideas come from? From new hires, fresh green recruits to your team. Why? Because they have fresh eyes. The truth is all of us have a tendency to become inured to the daily operations of the workplace. Small inconsistencies or inadequacies gradually become acceptable; opportunities for improvement or innovation go by the boards because we simply don’t see them anymore. But new hires see them. They ask simple but necessary questions: Why do we do it like that? Couldn’t we do it better?
It used to be the case in most organisations that if you got transferred to a part of the company out in the boondocks your career was in trouble. These days’ chances are good you will finally have a chance to participate in some meaningful innovation. The reason is simple: In many companies, headquarters is the bastion of the status quo; the closer you get to the throne, the less of a chance you have to try new things. But out on the periphery, experimentation can take place. This is where new ideas are born, tested, tried, and refined. If they work they can always be repatriated to headquarters. If they fail, they can be given a quite, dignified burial, and no one ever hears about those ideas again.
The best ideas often come from the people with the dirtiest fingernails. They are the tech reps at Xerox who actually repair the machines, and can offer the product development people a bundle of ways to make their product better and more reliable. They’re the call service reps who actually talk – and even more important, listen – to customers. Almost every company will tell you that the voice of the customer needs to be heeded and the call service folks are the one who have it ringing in their ears all day long.
The hard truth is, there aren’t any new ideas. There are only new applications and smart twists on old ones. So if you want to be in the great – idea business, one way to increase your flow of ideas is to steal them. The history of innovation is chock-full of “geniuses” who begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from one category and simply applied them to another.
Excerpted from ‘The Big Moo’ edited by Seth Godin.
Which of the following examples goes against the grain of thinking of the passage?
- A.
Starbucks continually tests and rolls out new drinks for their coffee shops: They test them in stores that function as real life R & D labs
- B.
Levi’s Dockers began in South America, and then became all the rage in the middle aged, slightly paunchy men’s market in the United States
- C.
Back in the heyday of the Sony Walkman, it became fashionable for strategists and marketers to disparage the value of customer input. “If we waited for customers to tell us what they want, we’d never come up with the things they don’t know they want until we make them,”
- D.
Toyota saves millions of dollars a year just by giving each assembly line worker a pencil and asking her to write down an idea for improving the process
Attempted by 1 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation:
The passage argues that great ideas come from fresh perspectives, frontline employees, experimentation on the periphery, listening to customers, and adapting ideas from other contexts. The example that goes against this approach is the Sony Walkman statement that disparages customer input because it rejects the value of listening to customers and frontline observations.
Why the Sony Walkman example contradicts the passage: it claims customers do not know what they want and that innovators should ignore customer feedback, while the passage emphasizes heeding the voice of the customer and learning from those who interact with customers daily.
Why the other examples are consistent with the passage:
Testing new drinks in stores that function as R&D labs illustrates experimentation on the periphery and repatriating successful ideas to headquarters.
A product that begins in one region and later takes off in another shows applying an idea in a new context, matching the passage's point that innovation often means new applications of existing ideas.
Asking assembly-line workers to write down improvement ideas exemplifies frontline employees generating valuable innovations, directly reflecting the passage’s claim that the best ideas often come from those who work closest to the process or customer.