If you don’t believe us, visit a beefed-up butcher called Victor Churchill in Queen Street, Sydney. No pre-packed meat here. The steaks here are displayed like fancy frocks and the staff perform like actors in a well rehearsed play. Some people watch, some people buy but all are equally entertained.

First, you need some neural nutrition. An apple for example. Second you need a mental workout.
Try switching your computer on and visit vibrantbrains.org. This is a San Francisco-based brain gym that aims to do for mental health what various sweatshops have done for physical health over the years. The target market is obviously ageing baby boomers but it seems that members of Gen Y are also happy to pay US$60 per month to stretch their brains via a bank of computers.

What’s next? Neurobics circuit training perhaps?

For example, when Steve Jobs was trying to persuade John Sculley to defect to from Pepsi to Apple he said ‘Do you want to sell fizzy water for the rest of your life, or do you want a chance to change the world?’ Amen.

The Opera House was built by three extraordinary men. One man designed it, one man that engineered it and one man that said yes. Perhaps the moral here is threefold. One you get what you ask for, two execution is underrated and three you earn iconic status by trying to do hard things very well.

For example, wealthy people tend to be time poor, so a Dutch-based private bank called Insinger de Beaufort came up with the idea to send its clients a shoe box. That’s right, a small box in which to drop anything finance or expenses related. Every month, the bank sends a courier to collect the box and, within three working days, sends back another empty box together with an itemised list of the resulting bills that have been paid. Genius.

Or how about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC). This was intended to provide a low-cost ($100) alternative to conventional laptops, but ended up creating the sub category of netbooks or sub-notebooks. As Michael Dell once said: ”It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path”.

Started by a beach bum with just $20,000 eight years ago, the $20 million dollar business manufacturers everything down-under, not because it’s easy that way but because it’s better to keep an eye on the quality of the merchandise.

In advertising agencies, for example, the solution is usually advertising whatever the nature of the business problem is. Or take the humble parking space. If you see the problem as not having enough public parking spots in urban areas you are missing an important opportunity.

A start-up called ”Park at My House” gives drivers the chance to park their car in private parking spaces across the USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, the Netherlands and the UK by allowing home owners to rent out driveways and garages when they are not in use. Posting the availability of spaces on the website is free but the company takes 10% of any ensuing transaction. Urban congestion? Maybe they’ve nailed it!

For example, fifteen or twenty years ago who would
have thought that water would become an important
revenue stream for the likes of Coca-Cola, Pepsi
and Nestle©? Who, in fact, could have predicted that
water sales would grow at around 10% per year in
recent years, outpacing sales of the soft drinks
category as a whole?

Water was probably invisible to these companies
at the time, given a disconnect with their core
strategy and beliefs. But another factor surely at
play was humans subconscious dislike of new
ideas. Because we all tend to favour information
that fits with what we already know. Hence it
usually takes an outsider to alert us to what’s
been in front of our faces all the time.

As someone once said, you cannot discover
new oceans unless you have the courage to
lose sight of the shore.