There was no World Wide Web.
I want you to sit with that for a moment before this story makes sense.
No web. No search. No profiles to read, no talks to watch. No way to find the people building the future of your industry other than their books — and no way to learn from them directly other than getting them into a room with you.
My thought was simple. If I'm going to sit through these meetings anyway, I might as well be learning from the best. So how do I get the best in front of me, so everybody else benefits at the same time?
The problem was that I was discovering these names myself. Reading. Researching. Finding the people at the frontier of what was actually happening in manufacturing and production planning.
And most of my board had never heard of them.
So before I could solve the fundraising problem, I had to solve a different one. I had to sell people on the value of bringing in someone they'd never heard of, to talk about ideas they hadn't encountered yet.
No clips to share. No profiles to point to. No recordings. Just what I had read, and what I believed about where the field was going.
Once they were convinced — and they got there — we had a different problem.
We didn't have the money.
We wanted to bring in people like Hal Mather — one of the foremost authorities on engineering bills of materials — and Ken Wantuck, who had just published Just-in-Time for America through the Forum. These weren't local consultants willing to speak for free. These were people you flew in. Put up in a hotel. Paid for their time.
We needed a fundraiser. We did a fifty-fifty raffle. The prizes were canned goods.
Nobody cares about canned goods. That was the point.
We taped twenty dollar bills to the bottom of every can.
First name got called. Winner walked up. Looked at the can. Started heading back to their seat.
Then they found the twenty.
The room lit up.
We never had a fundraising problem again.
One twenty dollar bill taped to a can of beans funded the flight, the hotel, and the room where our members sat across from the people writing the future of the discipline.
Before the web made that free. Before you could watch it on your phone. When the only way to access the knowledge was to find a way to get it into the room.
The creativity wasn't the fundraiser. The creativity was refusing to accept that the knowledge was out of reach.
Dominic Luzi · Chief Answer Grape, Management Alchemy