The Golf Cart Story & Innovation
08 Mar 2010
Never stop innovating. There's ALWAYS something you can do to improve. Here's a funny story from Ice To The Eskimos by Jon Spoelstra about a golf cart that needed a lot of innovating.
"A golfing friend of mine asked me if I wanted to buy a partnership in the used golf cart that he was going to buy. The cart cost only $500. I usually like to walk while playing golf, but for $250 I thought it was a cheap enough investment for the days when my feet were sore.
"A week later, I was at the club and my friend unveiled our new purchase. It looked pretty good. It even had a roof and side curtains for when it rained.
"The cart ran on gas. 'Let me show you how to put gas in it,' my friend said. He went to the front of the cart and pulled back a lever. He then lifted the entire cab of the cart backward, piviting it on a hinge attached to the chassis. 'C'mon and help me,' he said, struggling with it.
"I grabbed on to one side, 'I thought you were going to put gas in it,' I said. 'I don't need to see anything else.'
"'That's what we're going to do. Gas it up.'
"With the cab of the cart perpendicular to the ground, my friend pointed to the engine. It looked like a lawn mower engine. It even had a gas cap.
"'That's where you put the gas,' he said, pulling the gas cap off.
"Incredible!
"The maker of the cart was Harley Davidson. The same Harley Davidson that makes biker hogs. I guess they didn't have the experience of building an engine that didn't have a gas cap extended away from the tank by a pipe or tube.
"Once we gassed up, we played a round of golf. At the end of the day, we stunk. I'm not referring to our games. We smelled like we had been sitting all day behind a smoke-belching bus. The reason was that Harley Davidson had not put an exhaust pipe on the cart. The exhaust pipe was not lost or stolen, the engineers at Harley Davidson had never included one! There wasn't even a place for one. The exhaust would just flow out of the engine and seep up to where we sat in the cab. On a windy day, though, it wasn't so bad.
"I've always been amazed by that golf cart. How in the world did the engineers ever design that golf cart? At some time, did one of them say, 'Hey, we forgot to put in a tube to pour in the gas. And, wow, we forgot to put in an exhaust pipe!' Was the answer, 'Forget it. We'll just have these poor slobs lift the front of the cab all the way back. Here, hand me that hindge. I'll hook it on the back. And forget the exhaust. Nobody will ever notice.'"
All the Harley Davidson folks had to do was to spend a little time testing their product in the wild to learn of the cart's defects. Sometimes the best improvements to our products or business can come by listening to your customers and observing how they use your products.
