In our case we needed to offer would-be advertisers a reason to do business with us. We had no portfolio, and we couldn’t offer them a price advantage, so we came up with a new medium, one that was suited to the small clients we were trying to woo. Actually, our idea was not really new at all, more like a borrowed idea. The fact is, there are very few truly new ideas. Most successful innovators actually wind up taking other people’s “new” ideas and adapting them to a new set of circumstances. Did Starbucks invent the coffee bar or McDonald’s the hamburger restaurant? Not on your life. They, however, figured out how to adapt the idea in order to have it succeed in new areas and in new ways.

In recent years I have been written up in many articles and been featured as a keynote speaker in many industry conventions as one of the foremost innovators in the communications industry. And yet, I must readily admit that many of my best “innovations” were borrowed from things I’ve seen in other places or were suggested to me by others. I just knew how to run with them.

Thomas Edison was perhaps the greatest inventor of all time. And one of the things that struck me in a recent biography is that almost all of his inventions, with the possible exception of the phonograph, were borrowed from others. It wasn’t so much that Edison was a great inventor, but he was open to new ideas and improved on them.

I also try to be open to new ideas. More than be open to them, I crave them. There’s nothing I prefer than to be in the company of creative people. I find they stimulate my own creative juices. I also try not to make snap judgments about which people you can learn from and which you can’t. You can learn from everyone, and until you really listen you can never be sure who has something exciting to offer and who doesn’t. A former construction worker now manages over two hundred highly trained technicians for me. A nighttime tech support supervisor figured out how to replace a huge multimillion-dollar mainframe on-line system with a few small PCs, saving us millions.

At work, I ask all our senior managers to fill out monthly reports on the departments’ operations. I laboriously read through all the pages so I’ll know what’s going on. Sure it’s tedious. The part that makes it all worthwhile, though, is the last question everyone’s asked to answer. Suggestions? This is the part my eyes run to. Who knows what someone may come up with? Maybe a new technology, maybe a million-dollar sales idea, maybe a way to cut expenses in half. True, most of the suggestions aren’t that dramatic. But you never know!