Hitting the nail on the ...

Sometimes the example you choose gets it right...

 In my latest book Behave! I talk about getting people to be great problem solvers by accessing their discretionary thinking: "To continue to get employees to give you their discretionary thinking and deliver ideas that boost margin, you must empower them to implement their ideas…For a CEO this can be scary stuff. What happens if an employee gets an idea to build a perpetual motion machine! Do you let that employee pursue an obviously flawed idea? The answer to that question is the marketing answer: “It depends!” Sometimes the by-product of a crazy idea is a great idea. 

This Fall the Nobel Committee awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to William E. Moerner of Stanford University. Being very clever, he'd found away around a previous law of physics. In optics the limit to your ability to magnify something with a microscope was defined by the size of the wavelength of light. W.E. Moerner figured out a way to overcome that law-of-physics obstacle.

Robert Galvin, the late CEO of Motorola once said, "At times we must engage an act of faith that key things are doable that are not provable."