Introduction To The
Paperback Edition

Since the original publication of The Power of Impossible Thinking, the world has continued to demonstrate the extraordinary malleability of our mental models—and their importance. We have seen this in diverse domains, from the paradigm-breaking shifts that create new market space in business described by Kim and Mauborgne in Blue Ocean Strategy (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), to the global technological and political transformations explored by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). Mental models are at the core of understanding these and other changes—from work to personal life to addressing broader societal issues. Those who have been able to see the opportunities in these changes have been able to take advantage of them—from blogger-journalists to open-source programmers to Indian outsourcers. The world is changing in fundamental ways. It has many more degrees of freedom than it had in the past. But we need more flexible minds to see and act upon the freedom.

The End Of The 30-Second Commercial

The changes in our world can have significant implications for individuals and entire industries. For example, the entire advertising industry was built around the 30-second commercial. Where would Budweiser be without its Clydesdale horses and slapstick frogs? Where would Pepsi be without its gyrating rock stars? But the importance of these short ad spots is now dissolving. The TV remote has already taken its toll on advertising. A study of the 15 largest U.S. television markets by CNW Marketing Research, Inc., found that more than 43 percent of viewers were actively ignoring advertising. Additionally, more than 71 percent of viewers with TiVo and other personal video recorders skipped advertisements altogether. In some ad categories, such as credit cards and mortgage financing, more than 90 percent of commercials were being skipped over by viewers with TiVo. How can advertisers continue to spend millions on 30-second spots that will be ignored by all but 10 percent of the entire audience?

While this is a disturbing picture, there is a silver lining. Companies that have adopted new ways of thinking about the world have been able to find tremendous opportunities. For example, two web sites, Google and Yahoo!, now account for more advertising revenues than the prime time schedules of the three traditional television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) combined. Google is now the largest media company, overtaking Time Warner in market capitalization. This would have been unbelievable just a few years ago. This is truly impossible thinking.

The decline of the 30-second commercial has been met by other innovations from managers who are not limited by the blinders of the old model. Companies are turning to other approaches, such as hosting events, creating buzz, and using product placement. For example, in launching its new Scion brand, which targeted youth markets, Toyota shunned traditional advertising, spending 70 percent of its promotion on street events. The remaining ad spending was mostly directed toward the Internet. In another example of innovative advertising, players of Tony Hawk's Underground video game cannot move up to the third level until they drink a Pepsi. As Robert Kotick, Chairman and CEO of video game maker Activision, Inc., commented during the Milken Institute's Global Forum, "In our medium, people cannot skip the advertising." Companies are also working on ads integrated into digital television broadcasts, so viewers might be cued to pause the action in a scene to find out about a Dell computer on the table or be shown targeted "smart ads" tailored to their specific interests. The decline of one mental model opens the way for others.

A Global Brain

The changes in advertising are insignificant compared to broader shifts driven by technology, globalization, and other forces. We are on the cusp of breakthrough events in the Web which will have profound implications for individuals, businesses, and society. Networks are increasingly working like global brains in which individuals have become synapses that can fire in different patterns to create fresh ideas. Individuals are connecting with other individuals in incredible ways. The sheer scale, connectivity, and speed of these connections are unprecedented, stretching our old ways of thinking about the world to the breaking point. These changes challenge our mental models and our decisions about how we will organize and structure companies. How can we get our heads around these shifts? How should companies look at new product development? Is the IT department a help or an obstacle in a networked world?

How we think about these changes will shape how we perceive the opportunities and threats. The world is reorganizing itself on the fly. More than ever, we need a systematic approach to recognizing, assessing, and applying our mental models. This is the approach offered by our book.

In an interlinked world, ideas can come from anywhere and go to anywhere. For example, we received an e-mail message from a reader in Singapore with a note about an aspect of our book. The note concerned a study we discuss in the opening of the book in which subjects were shown pictures of tourists shaking hands with Bugs Bunny in Disneyland. Many subjects subsequently recalled a personal experience of meeting the rabbit in the Disney theme park. We point out that the Warner character wouldn't be caught dead at the Disney property. But in his e-mail to us, Cornelius Reiman of Singapore noted that in the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Warner and Disney characters did appear side by side. It required a bevy of lawyers to make it possible, of course, and the producers had to assure the temperamental Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse that they had equal screen time.

The tourists in the study still could not have had the experience that they recalled, but we were surprised by how we received the information about the film. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was made more than a decade ago in the U.S, but the note came from an individual on the other side of the world. This is the way knowledge flows in our world. It is challenging our mental models and changing the way we think and work.

Unintended Consequences

This is just one of the ways that the world is being turned on its head. Company-led models are being replaced by customer-led models. Top-down is being overwhelmed by bottom-up. But this shift is more than giving "power to the people," just as democracy was more than turning monarchy on its crown. It is a different way of looking at the world, a different mindset. We are seeing self-organizing systems for collaboration that challenge our conventional models. Complexity theory is moving from an arcane scientific topic to an ever-present reality. Mainstream news broadcasters such as Dan Rather have been humbled by independent bloggers engaging in "personal syndication." Programmers who are creating software such as Linux and Apache through open-source networks are challenging powerful companies such as Microsoft. In addition, encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are being created through collaboration by non-experts. This is giving new meaning to Jung's concept of tapping into the "collective unconscious."

The implications of these shifts are just beginning to dawn upon us. The Internet has been around for decades and has been in the public consciousness for many years. But its potential was not widely realized until recently because of prevailing mindsets. Initially it was used only in military defense and academic circles. Then, it was adopted for one-to-one communications such as sending e-mail. It then moved to one-to-many communications with web browsers and finally to many-to-many interactions through filesharing, blogs, and other networks. Pioneers such as eBay, Amazon, and Google could see its potential before anyone else and created businesses to act upon it. Other companies had access to the same technology, but did not have the same flexibility in thinking about it. This was where the real opportunities were created.

eBay, Amazon, and Google have all gone through continuous changes in their mental models and business models throughout their brief but profitable existences. eBay has added fixed-price sales to auctions and is selling products such as cars and houses. Second-hand cars now account for 30 percent of eBay's sales. In addition, 30 percent of sales on the world's best-known auction site are at fixed prices. Amazon has moved beyond books and now sells many other products. It also brokers used books for individuals. Google has leaped from searching the web to searching desktops, taking it into Microsoft's backyard. Google has also become a leader in online advertising. Many of these innovations were driven by the market rather than the companies themselves. At each step in the growth of these companies, managers have had the flexibility in thinking to recognize the next opportunities and seize them.

We live in a world in which the people who make equipment often cannot anticipate how it will be used. When Apple invented the iPod, for example, the creators saw opportunities that were not apparent to incumbents in the music industry. But once consumers had the hardware and software in their hands, they came up with their own innovations. One of these is the rise of "pod-casting," independent radio programs broadcast on the web and downloaded to individual iPods. There is no need for a broadcasting studio, no need for an FCC license, no need to purchase a specific frequency. The program can go directly from the producer to the listener, although often through an intervening blog.

The spread of broadband Internet access also has had other unintended consequences. The emergence of Internet-based, voice-over IP systems as a viable alternative to traditional telephone land lines has shaken the foundations of telecommunications, driving the price nearly to zero with services such as Skype.com. Now cable companies and other players have entered the competition for telephone service. Ubiquitous wireless Internet connections are changing the way we live and work. Lawsuits against file sharing have led to more creative workaround systems, as innovation is driven by a sense of injustice. These shifts have created tremendous opportunities for emerging companies and threats for incumbents. But to see these impossible attacks or impossible new advantages, we first need to be able to engage in impossible thinking.

A bottom-up, consumer-driven approach can unlock the creativity necessary to produce dramatic results. For example, a study at 3M found that product ideas from lead users generated eight times the sales of ideas generated internally—146 million versus 18 million a year—in part because lead users were more likely to come up with ideas for entire new product lines rather than minor improvements on old products. This is a transformational approach to innovation and collaboration based upon the emergence of a unique mental model. As the 3M study shows, the potential benefits for companies that embrace this new model can be huge. There is great power in this impossible thinking.

Rose-Colored Glasses

The return of the Internet is all the more surprising after the dotcom bust. By the end of the 1990s, it had seemed to some that it was all over. We saw the apparent triumph of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser over Netscape. We witnessed the success of record companies in shutting down Napster. There was a general perception that the Internet had lived through its glory days. As return on investment (ROI) reasserted itself with a vengeance, there was little talk about eyeballs. There was a feeling that the original innovation and breakthrough thinking of the Internet had been spent.

But, as Mark Twain might say, the rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated. Just as the euphoria of the dot-com bubble blinded people to its risks, the pessimism about the Internet was blinding people to its potential. The rose-colored glasses were replaced with dark glasses. What we need to recognize is that we see everything around us through the filter of our mental models. These filters may make things rosy or dark, but until we recognize the lenses we use—our mental models—we can't begin to understand the possibilities for changing our views. When we see these filters, we have the power to change them. This is the power of impossible thinking.

We don't have to choose either one set of spectacles or the other. As Ben Franklin discovered, sometimes the best solution is bifocals, to see the world through different lenses simultaneously. The new mental models for collaboration haven't eliminated the old. They exist side by side. As we point out in the book, "paradigm shifts are a two-way street." We still have network news, proprietary software, and Encarta, along with blogs, open source, and Wikipedia. Revolutions are not absolute, so we need to keep a portfolio of models and choose the one that works best for a given situation.

Power Of Intuition

Since the original publication of our book, additional attention also has been given to intuition. As we noted, intuition informed by experience can be a powerful way of accessing mental models. Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Blink! (Little, Brown, 2005) highlighted the power of such intuition by art experts who can instantly spot a fake that months of research hadn't revealed, and researchers who can predict fairly reliably that a marriage will fail by watching a few minutes of videotaped conversation between spouses. As we note, these insights often cannot be articulated (which can make them difficult to transfer to others), but they can tap into deep experience very quickly. We need to be careful that our intuition still fits with the realities of a rapidly changing world. By recognizing the mental models that underpin our intuition, we can better make this assessment. But intuition supplies an important mechanism for accessing and applying our mental models quickly. This is more important than ever as we live in a world of compressed cycle times.

The world continues to move in fast-forward. To take advantage of changes, we need to be prepared to think differently. This involves more than keeping an open mind. We need to actively identify our mental models, challenge them, and act on these new ways of seeing the world. We need to understand the usefulness and limitations of our mental models. We need to be able to creatively explore alternatives. Understanding and managing our mental models is more important than ever.

Challenging Our Thinking

We have been grateful for the strong response to the publication of The Power of Impossible Thinking. We have had an opportunity to discuss these ideas in many sessions in different parts of the world. We also have heard from many readers about how the book helped change the way they thought about not only business but their personal lives—from making a career choice to selecting a partner for life to improving a golf game. With each new headline, we also see the implications of mental models for broader challenges facing society, from rethinking intelligence gathering for recognizing terrorists to seeing opportunities in serving the poorest of the poor, as discussed in CK Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prentice Hall, 2004). Different mental models change the way we look at and address these challenges. We have learned from our interactions with readers. They have helped to test and challenge our own mental models. These readers continue to confirm the central importance of understanding mental models in order to make transformations in business, personal life, and society.

We are now very pleased to be able to share our insights on mental models and the power of impossible thinking with a broader group of readers through this paperback edition. We hope it will help you think the impossible so you can do the impossible in your own life and work.

Yoram (Jerry) Wind

Colin Crook