If you look back on the history of innovation you will find this pattern.
There’s a process that has it’s inherent pains. The pains are generally accepted by everyone as the norm. Then someone comes along and radically transforms the process. The pain goes away, never to return.
That creates value. But where did that value come from?
Sure, the innovator deserves a lot of the credit. But what he/she did was to merely bring value (value that already existed) to the surface. The value was already there, buried in the inefficiencies of that pain. Just like gold and oil lies buries in the ground. (And potatoes I guess)
Spreadsheets
In spreadsheets too we have ‘generally accepted pains’. I won’t list them here – those who know the pains know the pains – we endure them at each bottleneck in the accounting processes. Right?
An example is my Cruise Liner Co demo.
This demo shows a common individual spreadsheet task that takes place a million or more times every working day around the world.
The transformation is the elimination of the pain (that we didn’t even regard as a ‘pain’ as we think that’s normal) and replace it with two clicks. Job done in under 2 seconds.
Just think how much VALUE there is to be mined around the world just by that alone?
And the tens of thousands of people who can make that transformation happen immediately, and personally benefit from having ‘mined’ that value for the organisation. And further their careers.
Massive!
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