1 The massive scale of Walmart. The 2012 revenue gure is from Michael T. Duke,
“To Our Shareholders, Associates and Customers,” http://www.walmartstores.com/
sites/annual-report/2012/CEOletter.aspx. Other fun facts: Walmart is the world’s third-largest employer, behind the U.S. Department of Defense and the People’s Liberation Army of China. Ruth Alexander, “Which Is the World’s Biggest Employer?”
BBC News Magazine, March 19, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-
17429786. If it were a country, it would have the nineteenth-largest economy in the world. “Scary (but True) Facts About Wal-Mart,” Business Pundit, July 1, 2012, http://
www.businesspundit.com/stats-on-walmart/. Did you know there are no Walmarts in Australia, continental Europe, or New York City? Walmart, “Our Locations”; http://
corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations; Matt Chaban, “Walmart in New York City: Just How Desperate Is the Retail Giant to Open in the Big Apple?” Huffington Post, August 6, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/wal-mart-in-new-
york-city-losing-fight-to-open-store_n_1748039.html.
2 Sam Walton. The centralized-checkout story and the “copied” quote are from pages 336–39 of Richard S. Tedlow (2003), Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators in the Empires They Built (New York: Collins). The other examples of borrowing are from Walton’s autobiography: Sam Walton and John Huey (1992), Sam Walton: Made in America (New York: Doubleday). The Kmart quote is on page 104, discussion of other discounters on page 54, and distribution-center ideas on page 102. He says that during the early period Walmart was “too small and insigni cant for any of the big boys to notice,” so he would show up to the headquarters of a discounter in another part of the country and say, “Hi, I’m Sam Walton from Bentonville, Arkansas. We’ve got a few stores out there.” He reports that most people would bring him in to chat,
“perhaps out of curiosity,” and he says, “I would ask lots of questions about pricing and distribution, whatever. I learned a lot that way” (page 105). This is the discount- store equivalent of the pet owners who raise the cute baby alligator until one day it’s big enough to swallow the family dog.
3 Kaiser Permanente. This story is based on conversations between Chip Heath and Doctors Robert Pearl, Alan Whippy, and Diane Craig in August 2012. Background for the statistical comparison to prostate and breast cancer: Nationwide, it is estimated that between 210,000 and 350,000 patients a year die from sepsis. National Institutes of Health, “Sepsis Fact Sheet,” October 2009, http://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/
factsheet_sepsis.htm. Taking the midpoint of that range, if hospitals could match Kaiser Permanente’s 28% reduction, it would be the yearly equivalent of saving 78,000 lives. According to the National Vital Statistics Report for 2009, breast cancer kills about 41,000 and prostate cancer kills 28,000. Kenneth D. Kochanek, et al.,
“Deaths: Final Data for 2009,” National Vital Statistics Reports 60, no. 3 (December 29, 2011): 105 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf). Full disclosure: Chip has consulted with Kaiser Permanente on several of their change
e orts, which is where he heard of this story, though he had not talked with Whippy or Craig before the conversations for this case study.
4 Dion Hughes and Mark Johnson. This story is from conversations between Chip Heath and Dion Hughes in September 2010 and March 2012. We asked Scott Goodson, the CEO of Strawberry Frog, who has worked with the two, to talk about his experience with them. Goodson’s agency was founded on a network model, maintaining relationships with a couple of hundred freelancers around the world and picking a relevant subset to pitch each project for clients such as Frito-Lay, Heineken, Google, and Smart Car. Exposed to creative talent around the world, he has high praise for the ideas he gets from Hughes and Johnson: “When I work with them, I’ll give them a couple of days to think about stu , then I’ll get on the phone and every idea will be like, ‘Oh f*#@, that’s amazing. That’s such a perceptive way of thinking.’
Dion and Mark have a unique ability to be super, super strategic, to think about the brand and its promise and what’s going on in the world and to tie all that together.”
5 Kevin Dunbar’s scienti c analogies. The “search for other problems that have been solved” quote and the idea that scientists are often unaware of the critical role analogies play are in Kevin Dunbar (2000), “How Scientists Think in the Real World:
Implications for Science Education,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 21:
49–58. The other quotes and observations are from Kevin Dunbar (1996), “How Scientists Really Reason,” in The Nature of Insight, ed. Robert J. Sternberg and Janet E.
Davidson (Boston: MIT Press).
6 Medical plastics designer analogies. Bo T. Christensen and Christian D. Schunn (2007), “The Relationship of Analogical Distance to Analogical Function and Preinventive Structure: The Case of Engineering Design,” Memory & Cognition 35: 29–
38.
7 Laddering. Some marketers use the term “laddering” to talk about processes that get to the core needs of a consumer. A girl may use soap to wash her face, but a marketing “laddering” technique would ask the girl “why” a couple of times to determine that her deeper needs and desires are for “beauty.” For the marketers, the movement upward on the ladder is moving upward on an abstract hierarchy of needs.
We use the term a little more visually—as you step up the ladder of analogies you will see more, a wider range of analogies and more distant analogies.
8 Fairhurst swimsuit design. The bulk of the content of this example and most of the quotes, including the extended scene in the Natural History Museum, come from American Public Media, “The Waldo Canyon Fire,” The Story (hosted by Dick Gordon), June 29, 2012, available at http://thestory.org/archive/The_Story_62912.mp3/view.
The “roughness is the key” quote and “83% of medals” statistic are from a video describing why Fairhurst was a nalist in an award for European Inventor of the Year in 2009, hosted at http://www.epo.org/news-issues/european-inventor/finalists/
2009/fairhurst.html. The “torpedo” quote is from “Inventor Awards to Be Announced,”
BBC, April 28, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8022000/
8022077.stm. An account of the controversy and the ban of Fairhurst-inspired swimsuits is in Deidre Crawford, “London Olympics: Advances in Swimwear for Athletes—and You,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/
2012/jul/29/image/la-ig-olympic-swimwear-20120729.
9 Reduce drag and increase thrust. Peter Reuell, “A Swimsuit Like Shark Skin? Not So
F a s t , ” Harvard Gazette, February 9, 2012,
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/02/a-swimsuit-like-shark-skin-not-so- fast/ (accessed 9/11/2012). What’s funny is that the same scientist believes that the Speedo team didn’t do a good enough job replicating sharkskin. He thinks, based on some testing, that the performance improvement is largely due to the “torpedo”
aspect.