| Chapter 1
The Power Of An Idea
Nothing in nature is more fragile or more powerful than an idea.
Flying across the United States gives us a direct experience of the power of ideas. Every few minutes, our view of the landscape is punctuated by the sprawling web of a metropolitan area. Each city we see today began as an idea in the shared mind of a few people on an adventure. From that idea, families became communities and neighbors became markets. A tour of industrial parkways in any city is a tour of businesses that each started as an idea. Ideas have always had the power to transform resources and lives.
Ideas inspired democracy, the building of peace treaties and the dismantling of nuclear warheads. Ideas brought us jazz, the music of the Beatles, Mozart, and the blues. Thanks to ideas, we can now revive people from cardiac arrest, cure once incurable diseases, and perform miracles in surgery suites. Ideas built the cathedrals of Europe, the gardens of Japan, and the pyramids of Egypt.
Everything in science, technology, and medicine today was once labeled “impossible.” Connecting a computer in North Carolina to a textile machine in Thailand, congratulating a friend on a new project by phone at 30,000 feet, editing a document before it's printed, giving life to a child through the heart of another child. There was a time when experts considered each technically and financially impossible. Through ideas, they all became possible.
Ideas make things happen. They run the world; they run your life. If you want to understand anyone’s life, look at her or his ideas. If your organization does anything faster, better, cheaper or easier this year, it will happen because of ideas. After all, an organization is only as good as it thinks.
Take every opportunity you have to be a part of inventing and reinventing whatever it takes to make your organization a better supplier, partner, and employer. Joining any creative effort connects you to one of the most powerful and unlimited resources in the world: ideas.
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