Levy’s 10 Commandments for Success
Succeeding in the exciting, frequently gut-wrenching enterprise of product development and commercialization takes a lot more than a good idea, a strong patent, and luck. In fact, the idea is about 10 percent of the equation. If you want to beat what can sometimes seem like insurmountable odds, study the following concepts:
1. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take your idea too seriously, either. The world will probably survive without your idea. Industry will probably survive without your idea. You may need it to survive, but no one else does.
2. The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep running. It’s a mistake to think anything is made overnight other than baked goods and newspapers. My first corollary is: Nothing is as easy as it looks. My second corollary is: Everything takes longer than you think. You win some, you lose some, and some are rained out, but always suit up for the game and stick with it.
Inventions Wanted
General Mills has launched a search for innovation through its General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-Win). CEO Ken Powell invites submissions: “We believe that there is a great opportunity for us to enhance and accelerate our innovation efforts by teaming up with world-class innovators from outside of our company.” All submissions must be covered by an existing patent or have a pending patent application. For information, go to www.generalmills.com/win.
When the Convair Company couldn’t find a way to stop San Diego’s night fog from rusting the Atlas missile parts it manufactured, it put out a public plea for assistance. Norm Larsen, a local chemist, responded with 39 formulas. But it was his fortieth that held the answer, producing a petroleum-based chemical that gets under water and displaces it through the pores of metal. Larsen’s invention became WD-40; sales for this product top $100 million. (By the way, WD-40 stands for Water Displacement—40th formula.)
It’s not speed that separates winners from losers; it’s perseverance. It’s the salesperson driving 30 miles at 4:15 P.M. to make one last sales call before 5 P.M. It’s the actor auditioning for the hundredth time. It’s the writer facing a keyboard every day creating 25 pages to get 4 or 5 that are keepers. And it’s the athlete never quitting the team. These all show perseverance. That’s the quality required to hit the heights of personal achievement.
3. You can’t do it all yourself. My success continues to be the result of unselfish, highly talented, and creative partners and associates willing to face the frustrations, rejections, and seemingly open-ended time frames inherent to any product development and licensing exercise. I’ve also been lucky to meet and work with very creative, understanding, and courageous corporate executives willing to believe in me and gamble on our concepts. When we all work well together, nothing can stop this combo. The cross-pollination and subsequent synergism of these two forces result in success in which all parties share. For if any link in this complex and often serpentine chain breaks, an entire project could flag.
A good way to put it all into perspective is to sit through the credit crawl that runs following a television show or feature film. It becomes immediately evident how many more people than the stars and/or a celebrated director were involved to get the show on the air or screen.
David Berko, partner in East West Innovations, LLC, has a great response when asked if he’s ever upset not to receive credit for his work on a particular product. “I don’t care about the credit—I take cash,” he quips, referring to royalties.
While not disclaiming the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell noted that “great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments, I feel the credit is due to others rather than myself.”
Bright Ideas
In 1867, Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist, patented the dynamite stick while trying to find a way to make nitroglycerin safe to handle. He combined the powerful liquid with a fine, chalky powder and packed it into a paper cylinder. The term dynamite is derived from the Greek word meaning “power.” The Nobel Prizes were established using money from the sales of his chemical explosives.
It’s perhaps summed up best by advertising industry legend Bill Bernbach, who said an idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
4. Keep your ego under control. Creative and inventive people, according to profile, hate to be rejected or criticized for any reason. They’re usually critical of others. They are also extremely defensive where their creations are concerned.
An out-of-control ego kills more opportunities than anything. While we inventors need a healthy ego to serve as our body armor, it can quickly get out of hand and become arrogance if not tempered. Great mistakes are made when we feel we’re beyond questioning.
I’ve always found that my ideas are enhanced by the right touch. Working together or in competition, others contribute time and time again to making an idea more useful or marketable. Share an idea, and get back a better one.
I’ve worked with many egomaniacs, and most ended up as lonely as the survivors of the Titanic. Unchecked egocentricity can be a major source of failure. Arrogance has no place in the process. So if ego is a problem, check it here and now.
5. You will always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. If you don’t put forth the effort, you won’t fail, but you won’t succeed, either. Inaction will keep opportunities from coming your way.
Nobel Prize-winner William Shockley, known as the father of the transistor, described the process of inventing the transistor at Bell Labs as “creative failure methodology.”
Trust yourself. Don’t allow yourself to be deterred by poor odds because your mind has calculated that the opposition is too great. I once asked Dr. Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik’s Cube, why children are so good at solving his puzzles and adults often don’t even try. “Because no one has told the children that they cannot do it,” he explained.
6. Don’t invent just for the financial rewards. We all want to make money. That’s only natural. It is what we are taught from the earliest age. But you should be motivated by the gamesmanship as well. It may sound trite, but people who do things just for money usually come up shortchanged. To put it another way, pigs get fat, while hogs get slaughtered.
Although I’ve negotiated and received seven-figure advance and guarantee packages, other times I took a small advance against higher royalties and earned seven figures on the other end. And sometimes I didn’t earn anything.
As important as money is, you need to use common sense and judge cases on their own merits. Each industry has its own standards you can use as a baseline.
From time to time, I do paid consulting. I charge by the hour plus out-of-pocket expenses. I insist on first-class travel, top-of-the-line hotels, and so on. On the other hand, I don’t charge the licensees of my products for my time if it involves a product of mine. I just ask for out-of-pocket costs. I look at it as a marketing expense. I analyze everything in terms of risk and reward. But most of the time, I see it as my obligation and pleasure to do what it takes. If successful, I will benefit on the other end through royalties and more business, hopefully.
Bright Ideas
In 1948, George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, took a hunting trip into the Alps. As he picked burrs off his socks and pants, de Mestral wondered why they stuck to his clothing. When he looked closely at the burrs, he saw that they contained tiny hooks that caught on thread loops in his clothing. A light bulb went off in de Mestral’s head. Eight years later, Velcro was born. The patent on Velcro has expired, but the trademark is alive and the technology is used in all kinds of applications, from shoes to space suits.
I believe one of the shortcomings of the independent inventor is that he or she insists on being paid for every hour of labor. If you feel this way, get over it. Look at the bigger picture. Learn to trade short-term security for long-term goals. Except when I worked in the kitchen and bookstore at college, I cannot recall ever being paid by the hour. My corporate and government jobs were not based on hourly rates. Executives are not paid by the hour.
If all you want to do is make money, and take no risk, Will Rogers has some advice: “The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.”
7. If you bite the bullet, be prepared to taste gunpowder. Not every idea or decision works. So often do I find myself victimized by the Law of Unintended Consequences. One day you get the gold mine; another day you get the shaft. It’s easy for people who live by their creative wits to go from drinking wine to picking grapes. But I find the risks and gambles are what I love most about a career with no safety net. Knowing how hard the business of invention development and licensing is keeps my feet moving and me on the qui vive.
For every action, there is always a criticism. Odds are, you’ll encounter far more criticism than acceptance. This is simply the way it is. Don’t whine about mistakes. Learn from them. Don’t blame someone else. Take responsibility for your actions. Fix the problem, not the blame.
8. Learn to take rejection. Don’t be turned off by the word “No,” because you’ll hear it often, as in, “No, we’re not looking for that at this time.” “No, you will have to do better than that for us to consider it.” “No, your idea isn’t original.”
Rejection can be positive if it’s turned into constructive growth. Don’t let rejection shake your confidence. My experience is that products get better the more times they’re presented. Rejection is a rehearsal before the big event. I define “No” to mean “Not yet.” It’s the shakedown period, similar to the practice of taking a play out of town before it opens on Broadway. Remember that the finest steel goes through the hottest fire.
Bright Ideas
NASA Ames scientists developed a padding concept for a better airplane seat. Today it has all kinds of additional applications, including wheelchairs, x-ray table pads, off-road vehicle seats, ski boots, and football helmet liners. The material is open-cell polyurethane silicone plastic foam that takes the shape of impressed objects but returns to its original shape even after 90 percent compression and absorbs sudden impacts without shock or bounce. The manufacturer claims a 3-inch-thick pad can absorb all the energy from a 10-foot fall by an adult.
I rarely license a product to the first person that sees it. And for every product I’ve licensed, many more never made it off the drawing board, and probably shouldn’t have.
Bottom line: rejection of ideas is part of the invention licensing business. If you’re going to live by the crystal ball, sometimes you have to eat glass.
9. Believe in yourself. One of the first steps toward success is learning to detect and follow that gleam of light Emerson says flashes across the mind from within. We tend to dismiss our own thoughts without notice because they’re ours. In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back at us with a certain alienated majesty. It’s critical that you learn to abide by your own spontaneous impression. Allow nothing to affect the integrity of your mind.
Fast Facts
The terms patent pending and patent applied for are used by a manufacturer or seller of an article to inform the public that an application for patent on that article is on file in the Patent and Trademark Office. The law imposes a fine on those who use these terms falsely to deceive the public.
If you stand for something, you’ll always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you’ll find nobody against you and nobody for you. Take your choice.
Remember the advice of Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never, never, never give in—except to dictates of conscience and duty.”
10. Sell yourself before you sell your ideas. Be concerned how you’re perceived. You may be capable of dreaming up ideas, but if you cannot command the respect and attention of corporate executives, associates, and investors, your product will never get off the mark, and you may not be invited back for an encore.
Ideas come, and ideas go. Know how much to push. Know when to disappear. Don’t wear out your welcome. (Some people suffer from sellitus!) You can’t put a dollar value on access to a corporate executive’s valuable space and time. I cannot tell you how hard I have worked over the years to gain and maintain access.
Independent inventors who have corporate experience understand the fragility of ideas much better than people who have never worked inside. Former corporate types realize the pressures of such work, and people without this experience don’t have a clue. There’s an unwritten code of conduct. Inventors with corporate experience understand that there are territorial imperatives, lines one must not cross, manners that must be displayed. Alas, many great ideas never see the light of day because their inventors blow-up on the launch pad.
And for good measure, let’s add …
11. Know your market. Identify your market—both consumer and manufacturer—and know it backward and forward. One of the inventor’s greatest downfalls is inventing in a vacuum and not in the marketplace.
Nothing beats good preparation. It will help equalize your position vis-à-vis the professionals to whom you are pitching. The more you know your product and its market, the more confident you will become and the more you’ll be able to handle people who may attack your positions. A residual benefit of confidence is that it tends to be contagious. You want to make believers out of everyone. You want to enlist in-house champions for your concepts, people who will support it when you’re no longer on the front line.
Bright Ideas
Elijah McCoy, son of runaway slaves, invented the oil lubricator. Born in Canada, he studied engineering in Scotland and then worked for a railroad in Michigan as an oil-man. Back then, trains had to stop at regular intervals to be lubricated. Crews would run around squirting oil between the train’s moving parts. Without periodic lubrication, parts would rub together, overheat, and come to a halt. It was expensive and wasteful to stop the train every time it needed lubrication. So in 1872, McCoy invented the oil lubricator, a device that oiled engine parts while the train was under power. McCoy designed lubricators for lots of machines. People insisted on McCoy lubricators—they wanted the real McCoy.
12. The paranoids are chasing me! There are two kinds of amateur inventors, the paranoid and the more paranoid. If you’re worried about getting ripped off by licensees, don’t deal with them. Better yet, if you’re worried about being ripped off, go into another business.
The quickest turnoff is when a company feels that the inventor is distrustful of it. We’ve all heard about inventors who were ripped off by major corporations. Remember the Sears wrench and the hidden windshield wiper stories? But there are far more stories about honorable executives and great win/win deals. Instead of going in paranoid, I follow the advice of former president Ronald Reagan, who, when asked what it was like to work with the USSR, counseled, “Trust, but verify.”
There’s simply no way to avoid the ache and pain of hard work. Longfellow put it well when he wrote in The Ladder of St. Augustine, “The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
The Least You Need to Know
◆ Trust yourself and your instincts. They are anchors in a storm.
◆ Realize that what you can accomplish is truly amazing if you keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars.
◆ Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The price of never being wrong is never being right.
◆ Don’t simply follow where the path leads; rather, go where there is no path and leave a trail.
◆ Enjoy what you do!
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