The Sound of Opportunity

There’s a moment in the classic comedy “My Blue Heaven” where Steve Martin’s crew of thieves has just discovered that the truck they thought was full of valuable merchandise contains nothing but empty five-gallon water bottles, and most of the crew is looking dejected. Martin’s character tells them that they’re not looking at things correctly; this isn’t a bust, it’s an opportunity. He then uses the empty bottles to set up what at first appears to be a simple “fake charity” scam (using the empty bottles to solicit donations for a non-existent fund to build a new Little League facility) but which eventually grows into a very sophisticated municipal scam that actually does produce a new baseball facility for the town – while providing huge amounts of rake-off funds and sinecure jobs for the criminals, of course. At which point it’s really hard to say if this is actually a criminal enterprise any longer; it’s certainly nowhere near as unethical as the no-bid contracts for Halliburton in Iraq, for example…

My point here is that no matter how unpleasant the situation happens to be, simply looking at it and bemoaning the misfortunes involved is both bad strategy and also bad business strategy. You already know that it makes more sense to respond by attempting to find a solution for the problem; what I’m driving at here is that it’s usually also more lucrative to do so. A good case in point is the adoption of the oil separation machines being produced by Kevin Costner’s Ocean Therapy Solutions to deal with the Gulf oil spill disaster. You can pick up the ABC News Story about it if you want to, but basically the things are highly-advanced centrifuge machines that can separate about 2,000 barrels of oil from seawater per day, depending on the concentrations involved. This may not sound like much, given that there are somewhere on the order of 30,000 barrels being leaked each day, but apparently these devices aren’t that difficult (or expensive) to build; if you had enough of them you might be able to keep ahead of the spill…

This is not intended to downplay the seriousness of the situation, of course. Left untreated, the Deepwater disaster has the potential to destroy the entire Gulf ecosystem; if enough oil gets into the currents and spreads into other parts of the world there is a non-zero chance that the resulting cascade effects could destroy all life on this planet. It’s an unlikely place to find a simple business lesson, but that’s why I’m calling it to your attention, of course. Mr. Costner didn’t invent the technology, he just purchased the patent for it and set up the company that has developed the present applications after seeing footage of the Exxon Valdez fiasco on the news. And there’s no guarantee that the United States or any other national or local government will respond to this situation by purchasing enough of these devices to defend its coastline, let alone that any other oil company will catch on to the enormous public relations and legal defense potential of these machines (you can use them to lower your legal exposure to damages from an environmental catastrophe AND improve your public image AT THE SAME TIME) and invest in a whole bunch of them…

But if even a small fraction of the people who ought to invest in this technology actually do, Ocean Therapy Solutions and Mr. Costner are going to end up being embarrassingly rich – which leads me to ask you if there are any problems going on in or around your company that might have lucrative solutions if you look at them the right way. Maybe you should go and look…