Our Foodie Friday Fun this week revolves around rocks, bark, and dried flowers. You probably had all three for breakfast this morning. Seriously. Salt is the only rock we humans eat on a regular basis (or on any other basis as far as I’m concerned). The bark we regularly eat is cinnamon – you might have sprinkled some on your oatmeal or cereal. The dried flowers are pepper – maybe on your eggs?
You just know there’s a business point lurking here, and you’re right.
What’s interesting about each of the aforementioned food items is that someone had to be the first to figure out that these seemingly unappetizing things were actually quite tasty and useful in the kitchen. None of them, however, can be used “as is”. Peppercorns (actually a fruit of a flowering vine) need to be dried. Cinnamon needs to be transformed from tree bark into a dried and ground form. Salt comes in dozens of types but is either extracted from the ground or from the sea. I’m not sure who was the first to figure that out but it’s instructive. All have been used by humans for millennia and maybe the ancients were smarter than we are in some ways.
Sometimes our first instincts when we see something or someone who doesn’t appear to be particularly useful is to move on. Our ancestors couldn’t do that – food was not something you ran to the supermarket to get. In many businesses today, resource availability is in many ways as challenging as food was for the ancients. Everything they encountered was evaluated (I expect quite a few brave souls didn’t survive the “R&D” phase of new food discovery) before it was discarded. In the cases of these three items, someone had to figure out how to transform them into something useful. Maybe a dead animal or fish was preserved in a bath of seawater that dried. Maybe someone saw an animal eating tree bark and tried some.
We need to have the same mentality in many ways. Don’t dismiss anyone or anything out of hand. Take some time to think about how they can be useful in another form or another position (I know a lot of ex-lawyers who are great salespeople and a few accountants who do wonders in marketing). Rocks and bark may not seem like a great diet but thinking out of the box is at the root of a great business.
Consult Keith 