Asking the Right Question

Alonzo Decker was making hand drills for the US military during the Second World War. He noticed that the company kept receiving repeated replacement orders for more drills. He could have been happy with the extra sales but he was worried that something was wrong with the drill causing it to fail with regularity. Rather than simply replace the drills, he asked why.
What he found wasn’t the drill were bad, but rather they were too good. It seems many of the women that were working in the factories were taking the drills home with them on the weekends to do home repairs and not bringing them back. Now he had a new potential market that might last longer than the war effort. His company Black & Decker started producing domestic power drills in 1946, in four years they were producing their millionth. This tool helped to set off the DIY trend that made his company billions. Had he replaced the drill for the military and not asked why he never would have found a potential market just waiting to be tapped.

There is a lesson there that goes beyond business and marketing. Too often when problems come up we just want to solve them as quickly as we can without ever questioning why they keep coming up. It seems easier to just ‘send more drill’ than to question what we might be doing wrong. But in that self-examination, we might discover something that makes everything better.
A poor yet wise lad is better than an old and foolish king who no longer knows how to receive instruction.
Ecclesiastes 4:13

That’s why we always need to be willing to learn more by asking “Why?”. Seeking to not just maintain the status quo but finding out what needs to be done to improve. A failure might not be one at all but an opportunity to improve and grow.

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Ecclesiastes 12:10

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