Paul Sloane

you wonder why like if you're so good at this why can't you keep doing it what taxi company would have thought of uber what taxi company would have said we can create a whole new business by not having any taxis none of them and if you'd had a brainstorm meeting in a taxi company and said how can we get more business nobody would have said let's get rid of all our taxis and use the people who are prepared to give people a lift for a small fee

And if you were Marriott Hotels or Sheraton and you'd had a big brainstorming meeting and you say, how can we expand our business?

Nobody would have come up with Airbnb.

Nobody would have said, let's not have any more hotel rooms.

Let's just use the capacity of people who are prepared to rent out a room or their own holiday cottage or something else.

So people who are embedded in an industry find it very difficult to think really laterally.

Well, let me tell you about Jorge O'Don, and he is an Argentinian car mechanic.

A friend of his came over one evening and he said, I'll give you a puzzle, Jorge, and I bet you can't solve it.

And Jorge said, what is it?

He said, if you take an empty wine bottle and you push a cork into the empty wine bottle, how do you get it out again?

And Jorge said, I don't know how you do this.

And his friend said, well, you can see it.

There's a video on YouTube.

You can actually see it.

There's a technique.

And what you do is you push a plastic bag into the bottle and you jiggle it around until the cork is nestling somewhere in the plastic bag.

And then you blow into the plastic bag and you inflate it around the cork.

And then you can pull the cork out.

And Jorge thought, that's a very interesting idea.

And he went to bed that night.