Rocket Slips

Access Teams of Expert Solvers led by World-Class Facilitators

Home For Companies Company Resources For Solvers Solver Resources About Us Contact Us

Rocket Slips

January 12, 2008. By Peter Lloyd

The student of the creative process has learned many times the value of making mistakes. I for one have paid a lot of attention to the advice of Thomas Edison. His remarks on the invention process are quoted often enough to make them almost clichés.

I make more mistakes than anyone else I know. And, sooner or later, I patent most of them.

I’m skeptical about most of what I hear or read and more than just a little suspicious when I find that I’ve learned too much from one source. Especially when the source happens to be someone I admire. It’s definitely a mistake to limit one’s point of view and that includes following the advice of only your heroes.

Watching NOVA's “Sputnik Declassified," I heard Konrad Dannenberg warn, "If everything goes as planned, you don’t learn anything."

Here's someone from the other side saying what Edison said plus something more. His work on the German V-2 rocket left a path of blunders and destruction, but maybe no more that what you’d expect from leading-edge rocket research. According to the NOVA program, more than 20-thousand German workers died producing V-2s. Compare that to the 5,000 or so killed in and around London by the 3,200 V-2s fired at the city.

The irony alone colors Dannenberg's quote a shade darker than Edison's. And that’s before we follow Dannenberg along with Werner von Braun and a hundred-some other German masterminds to the United States in a move called Operation Paperclip. They helped the US lead and win the race to the moon, but only after the Soviet Union’s early head start with its pre-emptive Sputnik orbit. And not until Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and the first to orbit the planet.

Working for NASA, Konrad Dannenberg helped build the rocket that eventually took the first Americans to the moon. Which brings us back to the often-quoted Edison.

Make it a practice to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

Right Brain Workouts Explained

[NEXT WORKOUT]

Become a
Paid Problem Solver