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these great ideas. This may be through internal meetings, at retreats,
or even on the corporate intranet.
3.
Make it happen
: CEOs need to provide a slush fund so that these
ideas at least progress to the pilot stage. This may be through a cor-
porate-wide R&D department or through individual departmental
budgets. There also needs to be a way for these pilots to be seen and
heard. Finally, if the pilot gets selected to move into the pilot stage
the CEO must provide the means to drive the idea through to the
pervasiveness stage.
What Makes a Business Guru?
Business guru
is a difficult term. Wikipedia, the free, edit-your-own-
content encyclopedia, which is itself a wonderful idea that has reached
the pervasiveness stage, does not provide a formal definition of the term
business guru
, but it does define the term
guru
and its extension from a
meaning of “Hindu religious teacher” to more general usage as “an expert
of legendary proportions” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru). The term
guru
is nearly synonymous with
wizard
but implies that there is a history
of being a knowledge resource for others.
Wikipedia also provided an interesting discussion on why people are
attracted to gurus. Although it was written from the religious perspective,
I'd like to reprint it here with my annotations modifying the religious con-
struct to the business construct:
There are several reasons why people in Western cultures are attracted by
gurus. The most common is that people look for the meaning of life (
business
)
and are disillusioned in traditional religions (
business techniques and ideas
).
Wikipedia states that the gurus who are eloquent are the ones who are
more likely to be unreliable and dangerous. Wikipedia quotes the scholar
David C. Lane, who wrote that a charlatan who cons people is not as dan-
gerous as a guru who really believes in his delusions, and that the bigger
the claims a guru makes, the bigger the chance that he is a charlatan or
deluded. Of course, the context of this discussion really involves religious
gurus, but I am gleeful to report that I see many parallels here. here is a
fine line between business guru and huckster.
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