Lateral Thinking for Every Day

47

Turn a weakness into a strength

We all have strengths and weaknesses; people do, countries do, companies do, and products do. People with closed minds can be oblivious to their failings but open-minded thinkers can coolly assess their weaknesses. The obvious things to do are to minimize your weakness or to add things which compensate for it. A more lateral approach is to emphasize your limitation and turn it into a strength. How can you do this? Let’s look at an example.

A pint of Guinness takes much longer to pour than other beers and this might be seen as a weakness, but the Guinness marketing team chose to focus their advertising on this slow pouring and the anticipation of the drinker. They used the slogan ‘Great things come to those ...