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# Elegant Solutions

Dear Friend
& Subscriber,

Today we are going to examine what I call
"Elegant Solutions".

A true story: When NASA began launching astronauts
out into space, it was discovered their writing pens were useless once away from
the earth's gravity. Without that gravitational pull to force the ink down to
the writing surface, the pens were simply inoperative…

To solve this problem, NASA hired Anderson
Consulting. It took Anderson Consulting ten years and $12,000,000 (yep, that's
12 million dollars) to come up with a
solution. But, by Jesus, they got the job done! They devised a pen which worked
at zero gravity, upside down, under water, on practically any surface (including
crystal) and, in temperatures…

When the Russians started their space program,
they had this same "useless pen" problem. Did they spend ten years and
$12,000,000 to get an answer to this dilemma? No. The Russians came up with what
I call an "Elegant Solution"... they solved it by...

Using A 5¢ Pencil!

Speaking of interesting facts, I use a hardback
copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of
the English Language which has over 300,000 entries plus 2,000 maps,
illustrations and specialized supplements. It takes up an enormous amount of
space on a bookshelf and is so heavy, it could be used as an emergency anchor if…

Another example of an "Elegant
Solution": Years ago, in another lifetime, I worked in the credit
department of Standard Oil of Ohio. It's cold in Ohio in the wintertime and
Standard Oil sells a lot of heating oil. The way you would get it from them was,
to first fill out a credit application and, if the application was…

Standard Oil soon discovered they were spending
more money for the credit reports than they were losing to deadbeats who didn't
pay their heating oil bills. The solution? They continued to require people to
fill out credit applications but, credit reports were never ordered. It's true
Standard Oil had to eat a little money from deadbeats who didn…

A different Standard Oil story: They also had many
large commercial accounts and, the credit worthiness of those accounts were
checked out before credit was extended to them. This was done by getting a
D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet) report on each of the companies. There were all
kinds of formulas anyone could use with a D&B report. They could…

Anyway, Standard Oil kept track of all the
employees in their credit department to see how accurate their judgements were
in approving or denying credit to these large commercial accounts. You know who
the most precise person of all was? Me. Why? Because I never went to Dunn &
Bradstreet's school and I never learned to use any of their…

So how was I able to figure it out? It was quite
simple. At the bottom of each D&B report, there was a paragraph titled
"Summary". These Summaries could read something like this:

Summary

ABC Corp. is well managed, has a positive cash
flow, and low debt. Its employee turnover is remarkably low. Demand for their
product and services…

That's all
I would read. In that scenario, I would stamp "approved" on ABC
Corp.'s credit application.

On the other hand, sometimes a company's Summary
could read along these lines:

Summary

XYZ Inc. is poorly managed, overburdened with
excessive debt and lacks the inventory to fill their current and previous
orders. There are 14 pending lawsuits against…

When I read something like that, I'd stamp the
application "rejected".

Think about it: I had the highest accuracy rating
of all employees... yet... I didn't even understand how to read, analyze or
interpret D&B's credit reports. All I did was read the Summaries which
provided me with a ten-second capsule of what Dunn & Bradstreet…

Let's try one more: Years ago, a black man worked
in a factory located in the Northeastern United States. He was a janitor whose
tools were a broom, dustpan, mop, rags and cleaning fluids. As time passed, he
needed more money.

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…

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…

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…

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.