CHAPTER 18
Innovate Systematically
LEARNING FROM
Thomas Edison
Successful managers do not merely sit around waiting for brilliant ideas to occur to them; they work methodically. Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) showed us how to innovate systematically.
When one of Edison’s assistants went to see him feeling somewhat dejected after numerous experiments had not produced the desired result, the tireless inventor retorted: “Listen, I conducted 50,000 experiments to invent a new battery. The fact that those 50,000 possibilities do not work is a great result!”1 Not without reason is Edison also attributed with the insight that: “Genius is 99 percent perspiration ...
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