Overcoming convention: what you know for sure that ain't so.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: MARKETING SOLUTIONS

"Don't believe everything you think."--Thomas Kida

IT HAPPENS OVER AND AGAIN. Conventional wisdom that is heavy on convention and light on wisdom. One of the latest conventions to bite the dust is the crime rate. The learned class has assumed that difficult economic times lead to higher crime rates. So when the FBI announced that violent crime in the United States had reached a 40-year low in 2010, many criminologists were dumbfounded. Noted scholar James Q. Wilson reports in The Wall Street Journal, that as the national unemployment rate doubled from around 5 percent to nearly 10 percent, the property-crime rate fell. For 2009, the FBI reported an 8 percent drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17 percent reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. While a number of factors are behind this fall--the fact is that, most recently, higher unemployment is inversely related to crime.

We have seen this movie before in business. Grow large or perish, new technology will lead to stronger customer relationships, home values will continue to rise and--low-interest rates are here to stay. As Mark Twain said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Obviously having a flawed map of the territory--whether it be strategic trends, customer behavior, market opportunities, competitive risks, product offerings, or the like--is risky. Discovering where conventional wisdom--followed by you and your competitors--is off provides a huge opportunity. Growth companies and whole new industries spring up to fill the gaps that conventional wisdom has failed to discern.

While big breakthroughs like Michael Dell selling computers via direct mail and Starbucks exploiting an undiscerned desire for great coffee served in a great place are legend, there are innumerable smaller examples from everyday business. It may be simply discovering a highly valuable segment of customers in a local market that others have missed or a customer service best practice that works really well. Often we think of innovation with a capital "I" and ignore scads of lower-case "i" innovations that are meaningful. One of my favorites in the days prior to smart phones was a children's dentist located in a large mall. He gave moms beepers so they could shop while their children completed their dental appointments.

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