From the course: Leadership Stories: 5-Minute Lessons in Leading People

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Promote simplicity

Promote simplicity

From the course: Leadership Stories: 5-Minute Lessons in Leading People

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Promote simplicity

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- The problem was noise. It was a manufacturer of window unit air conditioners, and they wanted to know how much more consumers would pay for a unit that was significantly quieter than traditional ones. Now of course, you couldn't just ask how much more would you pay for a unit that only produces 35 decibels of sound. Only an acoustical engineer would know how loud that was. What the company needed were several prototypes with different noise levels to put in front of consumers to listen to. Now the problem was that they hadn't actually invented any of these quieter units yet. And that, as you can imagine, created quite a challenge for the consumer research department. Now what they decided to do was simple yet creative. Employees installed what looked like a regular air conditioning unit in a window at one of their test facilities. Only in this unit, they'd taken the guts out of it, leaving only the outer shell. Now then, they cut a four inch diameter hole in the back and ran a four…

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