Radical Questions Lead to Great Ideas

Questions are the inceptions of great ideas. The more radical the question, the more you are forced to break through roadblocks and arrive at answers that have never been reached before.

Radical Question = Huge Competitive Advantage

During the mid ‘80s, dozens of companies were trying to ride on the back of IBM’s success with the personal computer.  As PC “clones” began to proliferate, many of the clone-makers began to ask the question, “How can we reduce the cost of PCs to become more competitive?”

Most of the clone-makers were only able to achieve marginal cost reductions of 5 to 10 percent. But one company, a brand new one run by a young college dropout named Michael Dell, asked a different question. “How can we change the entire pricing structure of personal computers and drastically reduce costs?”

Having a more radical question/objective forced Dell to take on an entirely new perspective that resulted in a more than 40% price reduction over their competitors.

A more recent example

Managing email has become an almost unbearably large task for many people and everyone from Google on down has tried coming up with solutions. All kinds of plugins, filters, widgets, tags,  and folder systems have been created to combat email overload. Sadly, these solutions provide only marginal relief.

The awesome people at 401 Labs decided to fundamentally question how we do email. Instead of creating just another me-too add-on that only masks the real problem, they created a solution that turns email on its head. Their solution? Shortmail which limits the number of characters you can include in an email to 500. Like Twitter for email – Awesome!

Move beyond looking for new ways to solve a problem -Discover the right problem to solve.