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W EEKLY EDITION APRIL 19, 2017 Growth and Expansion: …continued Are You Blinded by Risk? Lia DiBello, President and CEO at a company called WTRI (Workplace Technologies Research Inc ) wrote the following blog post about a simple game that gave their cognitive scientists insight into the "blinding effect" of seemingly innocuous information. We'll let Lia take it from here. A Small Illustration of How being "Blinded by Risk" Happens to All of Us A number of years ago, [WTRI] designed a small exercise to demonstrate the idea of how a company can have beliefs about business "truths" that prevent them from seeing important opportunities. The example that got us thinking was the squeeza ble ketchup bottle. Heinz had dominated the market in ketchup sales. When approached by the inventors of the plastic bottle, they dismissed it. They believed their traditional glass bottle and the ritual of coaxing the thick ketchup out by tapping the bott le was iconic of their brand and important to their customers, and therefore a key factor in maintaining their position. We all know what happened. Hunts picked up on the plastic bottle and stole a large portion of Heinz's market share. Although Heinz now has the plastic bottle, they lost critical dominance for a long time. Now, nearly all condiments are available in plastic bottles. We started listing other radical ideas which had become important eventually but which were at first rejected by leading ind ustries. The SUV, digital photography, the personal computer and even the television, were radical ideas at the time of invention. We ended up with 10 stories. We realized that each of these stories has six components: 1. The idea itself. 2. The reasons why it 's a good idea from the point of view of the company that adopted it. 3. The reasons why the idea is not needed, too risky, or a violation of the product's image from the point of view of the company that rejected it. 4. The name of the company that avoided the idea and their market position at the time. 5. The name of the company that embraced the idea and their market position at the time. 6. The eventual outcome financially for both companies. We put the six elements of each story on a separate card and arranged them in a series to show how easy it would be to miss important ideas. Given that we then had a set of 60 cards, we had the idea of color coding each of the six types just to keep them s traight. PAGE 3 CONTINUED ON PAGE 4