Sol Price Part IX: Principles of Success: Keep Creating Ideas
The very fact that businesses live or die by the details means that you have an infinite demand for creative solutions to problems of every sort. In your early days, frankly, you'll probably find it easy to make changes, improvise, listen to others.
What Sol Price most remembers about the early Fedmart days is the spirit of brainstorming among all the partners. No idea, apparently, was too wild to be considered--from starting a bank, to naming house brankds after well-liked employees. He and his management team took Fedmart into everything from construction to insurance.
But big companies ("like big nations") tend to ossify. As Sol Price puts it, "You have egos, and you have turf--and you have a system in which an idea can be an accusation: 'You [idiot], why didn't you think of that yourself?' "
"One of the great challenges of success is admitting you can do better--and so, fitting new ideas into a working system.
Today Price Clubs are growing fast enough for people with ideas to rise quickly through the structure. More formally, the company operates Price Club Industries, which is meant to be its "entrepreneurial arm": developing new products and services for the stores to offer. Will that serve, or will the Price Club one day begin to slow down?
Only time will tell. The point for you is to keep your business as open as possible to new ideas every single day.
Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Publisher: WW Norton
Copyright: 1993; 1995
All Rights Reserved
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