Plato was the usual intellectual Athenian snob. He did not believe that anyone from the provinces (outside Athens) could think. So he and his followers suppressed the Sophists. It is true that many of the Sophists did no more than teach the verbal tricks of rhetoric. Others, like Protagoras, were very significant thinkers.
Protagoras pointed out that, if you put manure on the leaves of a plant, you kill the plant, but if you put manure on the roots, you make the plant thrive. He also pointed out that a dose of medicine given now might cure the illness, but given later would be useless. Also, a certain amount of medicine would cure the illness, but twice as much could kill the patient.
Protagoras was a system thinker who pointed out that value depended on circumstance and was not an innate quality, as Plato seemed to suggest. Christian thinkers needed the absolutism of Plato, so the relativism of Protagoras was forgotten.
Some things may be of high value in some circumstances, but not in others. If you have a headache, then an aspirin is of high value. But few people eat aspirin salads all the time (actually a small daily dose of aspirin does protect against heart attack).
A watch is of high value for coordinating events and people. If, however, you were alone on a desert island, a watch would not have a high value.
HIGH VALUE
Looking for 'special circumstances' in which the provocation would have a high value is one of the classic ways of getting 'movement'. It seems an obvious thing to do: but, like many obvious things, is rarely done.
A row of public phones at the airport are all priced the same. We can challenge this. Why not have one phone which is five times the normal price for the same service? At first sight this suggestion seems only to offer a negative value. Who would want to use such a phone and pay five times the normal rate? We now look around for circumstances which would give direct value to this provocation.
No one would want to use this very expensive phone. So that phone booth would tend to be empty. So if you needed to make a really urgent call, you would be more likely to find an available phone. If the call was really urgent you would not mind the high price. (This idea was first suggested when mobile phones were much less common.)
INVENTING
Everyone knows that it is far better to identify a need, and then find a way of satisfying that need, than to invent something and then try to find a use for it. The laser is often quoted as an invention that had to look around for a need to satisfy. A contrast would be the invention of the safety razor blade, which detected two needs.
The first need was for a shaving device that was safe and did not demand great skill. The second need was the ability to make profits from a continuing sale of the blades. Inventing is usually a matter of detecting a need and then satisfying that need to create a value. Valufacture - a word I invented in my book Surpetition (HarperCollins) - is much broader. Valufacture is the creation of value.
VALUFACTURE
Something which has little value in one place may have high value in another. Ron Andrews of Victoria, Australia, is the philanthropist who put up the funds for the de Bono Institute in Melbourne. As a young man he noticed a certain type of rock on some farmland. When the farmer was ready to sell, Andrews bought the land and established a quarry.
When the quarry was worked out, he sold the airspace for landfill (at a higher price than the rock in the quarry had fetched). Then he took the methane from the landfill and sold that to a power station. Then he took the waste heat from the power station to heat greenhouses. The final step might have been to take the waste vegetable matter from the greenhouses and to run this into ethanol (as fuel).
Valufacture is a matter of putting things together to create value. All businesses involve valufacture. The use of one party's waste in order to create real value elsewhere is a classic example of valufacture.
CREATIVITY
Putting something that is of little value in normal circumstances into special circumstances is just as much valufacture as invention. Just as much creativity is required. The very successful micro-lending of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh is an excellent example of valufacture for all concerned. The women who obtain loans of $100 can use this money to buy a sewing machine. The woman and her family benefit. The buyers of the clothing also benefit. The bank benefits. The maker of sewing machines benefits.
Just as dirt may be defined as matter in the wrong place, so value may be defined as matter in the right place. That right place is broadly defined as 'circumstances'. Those circumstances may be a more or less permanent set of circumstances (like people who cannot easily get mortgages) or the circumstances may be a particular point in time.
Giving water to someone who happens to be thirsty at that moment is time-dependent. The fashion industry thrives by driving cycles of acceptance so that there is demand for the fashion products at any moment.
OPPORTUNITY
Opportunity is the reciprocal of valufacture. Sometimes the opportunity is obvious to all. The tragic death of Princess Diana provided an obvious opportunity to certain authors and to producers of memorabilia. Then, many states and countries have in place laws to restrict landfill of garbage. In addition, new evidence suggests that incineration releases dioxins that cause cancer in those living nearby.
Between 60-70% of garbage is vegetable (putrescible) matter. This can be turned into ethanol. Ethanol up to 22% in a mixture with petrol can be used in cars without any modification at all. With minor modifications cars can run on 100% ethanol (which was the original fuel for cars).
The combustion of ethanol is considerably less toxic than the combustion of petrol. The existence of an ethanol industry now allows farmers to make money out of their waste (rice husks, sugar cane, etc.) and also allows farmers to grow crops that are needed for the soil (for de-salination), but which hitherto had no commercial value.
If the value is so obvious, then why is it not being done more widely? (Brazil is the exception.) Because the 'edge effect' of getting it going is considerable, and oil companies that control distribution are not that enthusiastic about a rival fuel. Value has to be seen by all parties.
SEARCH OR CREATE
I have been mainly writing here about searching for those circumstances which create value around something. This is a process of creative search which is every bit as creative as putting things together to produce value.
In fact, the creative process is very similar (use of concepts, etc.). It is also possible to create circumstances which give value to something. Soccer is a designed circumstance that gives value to kicking a ball about. Teams and football leagues are further steps in the design of circumstances.
Sometimes there is one missing ingredient, and supplying that missing ingredient sets off a whole chain of values. The development of telephone shopping depends on one missing ingredient which is not yet in place.
SUMMARY
Throughout Thinking Managers I have sought to show the difference between creating a value to fit a set of circumstances and finding (or making) the circumstances that give value to something. Far too often creativity only concerns itself with the first operation.
We seek to design new products and services. Yet the second approach is just as valuable and often much quicker. But the creative skill is very different.
In designing a new mechanical product, the inventor may need creative engineering skills. But finding circumstances that give value to an existing product requires very different skills. Instead of engineering skills, the thinker requires valufacturing skills. Such skills are never consciously developed. They are just supposed to arise by themselves.
Conversely, this special type of creativity does not require any technical skills. It is therefore open to everybody. The downside is that it may take people a long time to recognise new values, and by that time the entrepreneur may have run out of money. It is said that it took McDonald's four years before the breakfast business became profitable. People do not immediately rush to embrace a new value if it means changing habits.
Because the 'circumstance' type of creativity is intangible, and because it involves search as much as design, this type of creativity gets far less attention. This is a pity, because it is just as valuable as the more traditional type of creativity.
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