Elegant Solutions

Even though he was the lowest-paid employee, he
came up with an "Elegant Solution" which made his "take-home
pay" higher than the other employees... even higher than the company's
owner. How was this janitor able to do it?

His "Elegant Solution" was going from
department to department and selling raffle tickets to the other employees for
his paycheck. By the time he collected all the raffle ticket sales, his
"take-home pay" was considerably more than anyone else's in the
company. He'd sign his paycheck over to the winner and the janitor went home a
very happy man.

Try this on for size: A while back, a big direct
mail company desperately wanted the names and addresses of every buying customer
they could get their hands on. So, they had an "in-house" contest to
see who could come up with the best idea which would encourage all vendors to
collect the names and addresses of all their prospects and customers.

The big direct mail company's creative people came
up with many sophisticated ideas to get the vendors to capture the names. Do you
know what the winning idea was? Simply this:

Pay Them!

A story I've told before: As a rule of thumb, a
personalized letter (with the salutation "Dear Mr. Last Name") would
pull 300% more in orders than a standard letter which started out "Dear
Friend," or "Dear Resident," or "Dear Occupant."
However, in the late 1960's and the early 70's, the cost to type such a
personalized letter was enormous. If I remember correctly, it was nearly $10 for
each letter.

Then computers came along and made it possible to
create what looked like an individually-typed, personalized letter. However, few
people knew how to do this... so... computer-generated letters were still
enormously expensive.