Going beyond maximum return

One of my previous manager once told me the following story. It seems that this is a common story in India. The story goes as follows.

One day a man took a piece of leather to a cobbler and asked if he could make him a pair of shoes. So the cobbler measured the man's feet and said it will be ready in 2 weeks. Before the man leave, he asked the cobbler if he can make 2 pairs of shoes out of that piece of leather and the cobbler said yes but will need an extra week. Taken by how quickly the cobbler responded, this man thought that there must be a lot more leather than just the 2 pairs and not wanting to be cheated he asked the cobbler if he can make 3 pairs! Again, the cobbler said yes! So the man asked if he can make 4 pairs and again the cobbler said yes! The man finally stop asking after the cobbler responded positively to half a dozen pairs as he felt that 6 pairs of shoes from the piece of leather he provided is really good value for money. Weeks later when the man came to collect his shoes, the cobbler presented to him half a dozen pairs of tiny little shoes! Rather than getting a single pair of hand crafted shoes he can use, this man now have half a dozen pairs of hand crafted shoes none of which are of any use to him!

It seems that this story is not unrealistic. After leaving my previous employer, I joined a few of my friends in a start up and tried starting a training and consultancy service for this organization. As we were from the innovation centre for an American multinational company, we wanted to continue providing training and consultancy in the area of innovation. We approached many companies big and small, local and multinational with various results. The most amazing result we have thus far was with a Malaysian company listed on the main board of KLSE that has presence globally. Even though we were relatively unknown outside the innovation centre we came from, we were selected to be the consultant for their innovation initiative. Over a 3 months period, we trained a team of 4 executives seconded from various operations and it is so rewarding to see them transformed to a level where they could provide valuable and meaningful advice to their creative agencies! At the time of this posting, this team is also in the process of filing the first patent for their company.

The other extreme we have encountered, as you would expect, are people who flatly don't believe in us and said no. Then we have the following. The people we talked to are interested but they are either not willing to pay for the service we provide or only very little. An example of this is another listed Malaysian company also with presence overseas. We had many discussions with them and finally agreed on a compressed session where we discard and/or shorten a few modules to pack a 2 day workshop into 1 day. They were unwilling to pay the normal fees and so we only asked for a nominal fee in the hope that there will be continuing business. Within that limited time, we showed all we could on the techniques we normally cover in our workshops but was not able to go in depth into the intricacies of any of them. These are techniques I spent 18 plus months training myself. They were very happy with what they learned and called us back for more discussions and it all suddenly stop. We heard from one of their ex-employee that they were able to generate a few good ideas using the techniques they learned from us but could not turn these ideas into something tangible. In other words, they were still unable to innovate. And with that they discredit our method. This is a little like the man in the above story saying that the cobbler does not make good shoes.

Another way of viewing this comes from an English friend. He built his own house in England before migrating to Australia and would frequently tell us interesting stories about the building of this house. There is one of these stories where he related how he negotiated with a contractor and he would stop pressing the contractor for more discount. His explanation is that the contractor may say yes but the quality and workmanship of the work after that may be questionable.