Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
99
 www.ideavirus.com
the basic concept behind your idea, the less Medusa-like it is. But often, that’s a good thing.
Real change, and the profit that goes with it, often comes from unsettling ideas that
significantly alter the way people interact with each other and with your company. And those
ideas aren’t as smooth as some others.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
100
 www.ideavirus.com
Persistence
In our quest for the quick hit, the easy way to start a business or just to increase our power as
sneezers, there’s a real desire for a shallow virus. A joke. A gimmick. A neat new technology
geegaw that won’t be around tomorrow.
Laser pointers are a fine example. I was in a meeting last month where the presenter used a
laser pointer to highlight various things on his deathly boring Powerpoint slides.
Unfortunately for me, not only was the presentation boring, but he kept aiming the laser at
the TV monitor, which reflected this highly focused electromagnetic radiation right at my
face, hitting me in the eye a few times. I finally got him to turn the thing off, but not
without considerable struggle.
Other than this unfortunate incident, I can’t remember how many years ago it was that I saw
someone actually using one of these pointers.
What happened was that the pointer came out, and for a few early adopters, it felt
marvelous. It touched a Jungian need in us (especially men, I think) to have a magic stick
that could project our thoughts on the wall. Of course, the best place to use one was in a
meeting of other nerds. And all the other nerds noticed the laser pointer and a virus was
spread.
But after we all went out and bought laser pointers, we discovered that they weren’t
particularly useful. After all, how much information could one really have to present that we
needed a high-tech device to point out the good stuff from the bad?
So the lasers ended up in a drawer.
In other words, the virus wasn’t persistent. Those who resisted the initial temptation to rush
out and buy a laser pointer stopped being exposed to them, and the virus died off.

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