When do you have too much money and not enough brains?
This story was posted on Sept. 22 by Tom Ehrenfeld on www.800ceoread.com.
Out of the Box Marketing by David Abingdon
One of the first things I look at in a new book is the Intro or the Forward.
A January 2006 book called Out of the Box Marketing has a great story about
looking around before throwing money at a project.
Check this out:
American astronauts upon first going into space soon discovered that their pens didn’t work in zero gravity. So NASA embarked upon a program to invent a writing instrument that would work in outer space. After spending millions of dollars and burning thousands of man hours on research and engineering, they finally developed a "pump pen" that could write anything, anywhere, at
any angle.
Meanwhile, in the secret laboratories behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet Union scientists casually took note of the researches of their American counterparts. They spent almost no time and no money solving this problematic dilemma. They already had the answer, their cosmonauts used…pencils.
Thanks, Tom, for sharing this great story.
...and can somebody please tell me why the US government has announced plans to return to the moon? Oh, that's right, we end up developing some really nifty pens that can write without gravity.
Just between you and me, I can think of far better ways to spend billions of dollars. What about you?
How would you replace government programs that waste money with really useful ones? Just hit the comment button below...
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