How to Catch a Runaway Dog

We had a very wayward dog when I was growing up. Twelve hours out of twenty four we had her tied up on a rope so she couldn’t bite people during the day. We let her loose at night. But once in a while she got off the hook during the day. Very hard to catch her when she did. But my mother knew how; get a bone, dry or not, and wave it in her (the dog’s) face.

This is true not only for dogs. Marketing uses the same concept. Research and development use the same concept. What do people want? How do they behave? How can we reach them? New might be good but not interesting. People resist the new. A good salesman will sell the new using the old language. “You will love this”, he says to an 84-year old woman; “my grandma loves it so much”.

This lands me on the page where I wanted to be. Social entrepreneurs. Change agents. Non profits. A very meaningful non profit had mercy on us when we were growing up in a refugee camp. Someone from far away working with an international non profit came to our refugee camp and found us playing a soccer ball made out of banana fibers. He was so moved that he went home, collected money and sent 100 soccer balls to us. I was 10. But the new soccer balls had one problem. They bounced a lot and we played on dry gravel, sand and soil. We didn’t find bouncing balls very useful in our game. So we decided to make some changes. We started by reducing the air inside. But that too did not work because the thing could not get off the ground. So we did what we knew how to do best. We sold the balls and bought plastic bags. We had always dreamed of making balls out of plastic bags. Plastic bags were way cooler than banana fibers. But we never had money to buy plastic bags. So we upgraded using the money we made from our new imported soccer balls. I think we sold the balls for a 10th of what it actually cost our friend to buy them. But who cared. We saw the balls as an opportunity to get what we had always needed, not what someone else thought we needed. I wish our friend had asked. He would have changed our lives for way less than he paid