Mothers of Invention
By Peter LloydAgatha Christie once took issue with the old saw, "Necessity is the mother of invention." She said the real mother is laziness.
True. Inspired by Sloth, one of the Seven Creative Juices, people invent machines to do the work they don't want to do or can't get other people to do properly.
Josephine Cochrane, a well-to-do home-maker in Shelbyville, Illinois, got fed up with the dirty and broken dishes her careless kitchen help left behind. So she invented the dishwasher. And it won first prize in its category at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. When other well-to-do people began ordering Cochrane's dishwasher, she patented it, and eventually teamed up with an Ohio manufacturer. They improved the design and began to market the Kitchenaid.
But the product was not an immediate success. The average woman in those days, believe it or not, would rather do the dishes by hand.
The mothers of invention in this case were not lazy housewives. They wanted the work and did it well. The dishwasher was mothered by the people who delegated the job to others, who had no real motivation to do it.
Your greatest job security, it would seem, is to love what you're doing. Of course, for most of us that means finding an employer who will pay you to do what you love.
The perennial best-seller What Color Is Your Parachute? tells you how to spot one. "Bad employers" it says, "will not care whether you enjoy" your job, only "if you know how to do it... good employers will care greatly."
Following that logic, good employers—those who know that creativity and innovation thrive when their employees love what they do and are free to do it—can also earn the title, "mothers of invention."
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.