Re: User-Community-Generated Documents
Message #2 Posted by glynn on 30 Nov 2001, 2:38 a.m.,
in response to message #1 by Dan M (Vermont, USA)
Thanks Dan.
I had never seen that novel "convertible" design before. Pretty cool!!! (That thing has more ports than the U.S. Navy... one could get rich just stocking and selling the spare doors for it... but I do WANT one!)
WAS already familiar with Richard Nelson's doc; good to look it over again though. I'd follow RJN anywhere; he's brilliant, as are many of the other contributors.
The document itself, though, reminds me a little of the old "Saturday Night Live" bit where Chevy would do the news headline and in an inset screen, Garrett Morris would scream it at the top of his lungs, slowly, "for the benefit of the hard of hearing":
"OUR... TOP... STORY... TONIGHT..."
If management is not tuned in to listen to the outside, no amount or quality of transmittal, at any volume, makes it to their ears.
Outside HP, I think, the document will always remain influential; it was a great attempt to do something CONSTRUCTIVE, and as such, its suggestions still have the power to live beyond the events of yesterday and maybe be reborn in some form of company strategy in a future time, maybe in a future company.
You could literally take the Marketing Plan as a blueprint for marketing many sophisticated products that need to wedge in and establish footholds on an extant status-quo.
Sometimes even a negative example in your past influences you to do things right; I never took to drinking much, primarily because of a tragically-fated uncle who had... Similarly, the advice that HP management never really heard may someday make the case, by example of HP's course, why such advice has wisdom and SHOULD be heard and followed.
TO ALL: and Dan, to you, too: the VERY EXISTENCE of user-generated documents like these is proof that invention and innovation are NOT the sole property of big behemoth corporations-- that, YOU, too can create and do for yourselves something purer and truer to the reality of a situation than what often emerges from well-paid but tightly-bound executives in THEIR thought exercises. NEVER think of these things as failures because they caused no ripples at HP. It wasn't for Them (though that's who it may have been MEANT for).
Good ideas often must await for some cork to loosen, then they bubble up as their time comes. If DaVinci were ever to be brought forward to this time, I'd be cheering him up-- with a helicopter ride...
Be + !
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