192 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
initiative. But the truth is that we can get wonderful inspirations
from standing on the shoulders of the greats. Even the not-so-greats,
who just happen to have some terrific ideas.
I cannot tell you how many times, when I’ve been asked to
help teams brainstorm a new product or concept, this simple ad-
vice is overlooked. For example, I was helping a church develop a
membership drive and I simply asked, “What are the techniques of
the successful churches?” From the expressions on the participants’
faces, you would have thought I had said, “By the way, everyone,
Nietzsche was right: God is dead.” No one had researched what
other churches were doing. This question should always be the
starting point. The great inventor Thomas Edison said, “Keep on
the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used
successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to
the problem you’re working on.”
A famous example of this principle is the printing press. Johann
Gutenberg combined two well-known inventions: the wine press
and the coin stamp. His genius was simply in seeing how these two
already existing devices could be combined to produce a third one.
The world is full of these examples, like drive-through ATM ma-
chines borrowed from fast-food outlets.
The same will happen in the world of finance. Leslie Rahl,
president of Capital Markets Risk Advisors, said in 1998, “I ab-
solutely believe that we’re going to take lessons in finance from
other parts of science.” Of course, it has happened many times
already. Perhaps the most famous example is Professors Black and
Scholes borrowing heat transfer equations from the world of phys-
ics to create the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model.
If investors can shift into the open mode, described in Chapter
19, and ask themselves how new developments in other areas can
be applied to the world of investing, they will be surprised. And
delighted.
The applications may not be confined to new inventions, ei-
ther. Consider the implications for research. Information is essen-14-25 ware 192 1/19/01, 1:16 PM