Richard Gottlieb

“When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’”

Those words were spoken by Andrew S. Grove, one of the co-founders of Intel. I read these words in an article I found in a New York Times article entitled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.”

The article, in short, makes the case that the more you know the less you know. Why? Because you become so enmeshed in your own knowledge that you assume that everyone knows what you know. 

I saw this just last year when a company wanted me to analyze their packaging to figure out why their product wasn’t selling. I looked at it for a minute, looked up, smiled, and said: “It’s because you forgot to say what it is.” 

Yes, they had a cute picture of a cartoon character on the front of the box and a non-descriptive but clever name for the product. They didn’t however, show the product or identify what it did. Potential customers were clueless.

They sat there looking kind of dumbfounded and embarrassed. They were smart people who had worked with their product for so long that they knew what it was so they assumed everyone else did as well.

I see this kind of thinking more than you would think. It’s not just that people assume everyone knows what they know. It’s that they tend to surround themselves with other people who know what they know as well. They all speak the same jargon and shorthand to each other in a wonderful little language that eventually becomes intelligible to just a few people.

As we in the toy industry sort through the rubble of this past year we may want to take some time out and listen to some new voices. Talk to people who are smart and savvy but don’t know what we know about our particular business, our particular product or our particular job. Tell them what we are doing and watch for how they react.  If we are using lots of jargon; if we are using lots of abbreviations and acronyms; and if we are making lots of assumptions we may want to step back and reconsider what we “know.” It may be a lot less than we think.

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on January 3, 2008 | Comments (1)