tailieunhanh - How to Pitch a Brilliant Idea

All too often, entrepreneurs, sales executives, and marketing managers go to great lengths to show how their new business plans or creative concepts are practical and high margin—only to be rejected by corporate decision makers who don’t seem to understand the real value of the ideas. Why does this happen? It turns out that the problem has as much to do with the seller’s traits as with an idea’s inherent quality. The person on the receiving end tends to gauge the pitcher’s creativity as well as the proposal itself. And judgments about the pitcher’s ability to come up with workable. | 1 factiva. How to Pitch a Brilliant Idea Kimberly D Elsbach University of California Davis 4 688 words 1 September 2003 Harvard Business Review 117 0017-8012 English Copyright c 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Coming up with creative ideas is easy selling them to strangers is hard. All too often entrepreneurs sales executives and marketing managers go to great lengths to show how their new business plans or creative concepts are practical and high margin only to be rejected by corporate decision makers who don t seem to understand the real value of the ideas. Why does this happen It turns out that the problem has as much to do with the seller s traits as with an idea s inherent quality. The person on the receiving end tends to gauge the pitcher s creativity as well as the proposal itself. And judgments about the pitcher s ability to come up with workable ideas can quickly and permanently overshadow perceptions of the idea s worth. We all like to think that people judge us carefully and objectively on our merits. But the fact is they rush to place us into neat little categories they stereotype us. So the first thing to realize when you re preparing to make a pitch to strangers is that your audience is going to put you into a box. And they re going to do it really fast. Research suggests that humans can categorize others in less than 150 milliseconds. Within 30 minutes they ve made lasting judgments about your character. These insights emerged from my lengthy study of the 50 billion . film and television industry. Specifically I worked with 50 Hollywood executives involved in assessing pitches from screenwriters. Over the course of six years I observed dozens of 30-minute pitches in which the screenwriters encountered the catchers for the first time. In interviewing and observing the pitchers and catchers I was able to discern just how quickly assessments of creative potential are made in these high-stakes exchanges. The