Barriers to adoption

Many European businesses work around this by managing by the week or 4 week period, but this simple solution was not enough for George, he wanted the whole calendar and its months to change to suite his business efficiency. So George proposed adopting the Cotsworth Calendar with its 13 months each of exactly four, seven day weeks. The fact that this required inserting a new month “Sol” between June and July appeared not to be a serious barrier in his eyes. Nor did this rational man appear worried by the fact that every month would have a Friday the 13th.

This was the official calendar of the Eastman Kodak Company from 1928 to 1989.

Surely the man who was responsible for developing the first film in a roll and giving us the “You Press The Button and We Do The Rest” Kodak camera, would know something about adopting new technologies? Surely, this man who had developed the flexible transparent film that was to be pivotal to the development of the motion picture industry, would have been able to spot a winner? Nope.

Did he have any sense of history? Our current Gregorian calendar was created by a papal bull in 1582. Pope Gregory XIII choose not to deal with the disparity between the then Julian calendar and the actual solstice (a difference which had grown to 10 days) by skipping leap days for 40 years, but to make the correction in one hit. When the British Empire adopted in 1752 there were riots over the lost days (11 by then). Listen to history George; 170 years delay to bring in a necessary correction and it still provoked riots. Dope.

If we want our innovative products to be adopted, we do have to make sure that they offer real, tangible benefits to those we want to use them. It is a lunatic error to expect other people disrupt their lives because it will offer benefits to someone else (George’s management team). They won’t and if you force them, they are likely to riot.