When Bill Hewlett pushed for the development of a handheld calculator, the marketing management at HP were fiercely against the idea.
So they did what managers often do when they want to get their own way, they hired a consultant to support their view.
In this case, the HP marketing group hired the Stanford Research Institute which produced a report and presented it to Hewlett.
Tom Perkins, co-founder of
"It was, put politely, extremely negative", recalls Perkins, "at the end, Bill just smiled and said: 'Well I guess that gives us the go-ahead'."
The resulting product, the HP35, was a massive success and initiated a hugely successful new product line for HP.
What a great story!
This industry (perhaps others too) spend too much on consultants who 'borrow your watch to tell you the time' (no disrespect to consultants).
A possible follow-on from this would be a brief analysis of how many of the top ideas came from good old fashioned intuition versus how many came from highly analysed consultations...?
It is one of the most amazing things to me to see how much people, especially governments, are prepared to spend on consultants