I was doing some research on selling professional services, and ran accross the “best business brochure ever written”. It was a brochure written by Arthur D. Little for his fledgling consulting firm. In it, he describes how his team literally converted sows ears into a silk purse!

The purpose of the article? To demonstrate that the commonly accepted wisdom is not “true”, merely difficult. Secondly, along the same lines, the firm sought to make lead balloons fly. Quite successfully, too!

Here’s some insight into the process.

Here is the actual brochure

So often, when faced with a difficult situation, we accept the conventional wisdom as being “true”, when really, we haven’t looked deeply enough into the situation, challenging ourselves to find the essence of the problem.

I find the more problems I solve, the less willing I am to accept the conventional solutions. In fact, the more publicity a solution recieves as being “correct”, the more skeptical I become!

“Things that everybody thinks he knows only because he has learned the words that say it, are poisons to progress. The only way to get ahead is to dig in, to study, to find out, to reason our theories, to test them – and then hold fast to what is good”