by JACK LYNE, Site Selection Executive Editor of Interactive Publishing

"Would everyone in the room here please do something for me?" high-profile consultant and author Jeff Tobe asked his audience on March 6th at the International Asset Management Council’s (IAMC) Professional Forum in Amelia Island, Fla. "Would you take your watch off the wrist that it’s on now and put it on the other wrist, just like I’m doing now?

"Feels funny, doesn’t it? I wonder how many of you can keep your watch on that other wrist for 24 hours?"

It might sound like a strange way to start a speech, much less to stimulate creative thinking. There was method, though, to Tobe’s wrong-wristed madness.

"What do we do just because it’s a habit?" he asked in his March 6th presentation. "And how do you here in this audience today look at corporate real estate now that the market has changed?"

The author of the best-seller Coloring Outside the Lines: Business Thoughts on Creativity, Marketing & Sales cited a 1988 study that predicted "drastic changes in the corporate real estate profession every three years. Today, they’re predicting drastic changes every 11 months. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; that’s what everybody always tells you, right? Well, if it ain’t broke, break it!"

Selected by readers of Meetings and Conventions magazine as "one of the top 15 motivational speakers in North America," the energetic Tobe used the 1950 movie Harvey to illustrate out-of-the-box thinking. James Stewart stars in that film as Elwood P. Dowd, whose constant companion is Harvey, a rabbit standing six feet, three and a half inches (1.96 meters) — but only Dowd can see Harvey. Elwood's sister thinks he’s delusional and has him committed to a mental ward. Finally, his psychiatrist also sees the giant rabbit.

"Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it," Elwood declares. Dowd is released and resumes his normal, happy life. "Well," he reflects, "Harvey has overcome not only time and space, but any objections."

In similar fashion, corporate asset managers can add substantial value by embracing "the Harvey principle," Tobe told IAMC attendees.

"We have to learn to see invisible opportunities in a global market where everyone else sees only visible limitations," he explained. "You have the ability to create your own future from scratch, to see the invisible ideas that will change your profession."

Tobe used the FedEx logo to emphasize that point. A colleague, he recalled, pointed out a unique feature in that logo’s typography: The intersection of the "E" and the "x" forms a right-pointing white arrow.

"Now, when I see a FedEx truck go by, I can try not to see that arrow, and maybe I won’t see it for a fraction of a second," said Tobe. "Every time, though, I do end up noticing it. Once, I couldn’t see that arrow at all, and now I can’t not see it."

Most people, Tobe contended, claim that the lack of time and resources is the primary limitation that prevents them from thinking outside the box. But all of us, he insisted, suffer from our own self-imposed limits. Tobe, whose corporate clientele includes DaimlerChrysler, IBM, Ethicon Pharmaceuticals, Nestle USA and ReMax International, listed "five symptoms of AMPIDS — Asset Management Professional’s Innovation Deficiency Syndrome":

• Internal Myopia
• Ostrich Syndrome: "That’s people pretending that change isn’t happening around them. And you know what part of the ostrich is left exposed when it sticks its head in the sand, don’t you?"
• Psycho-sclerosis: "That’s hardening of the attitudes."
• Feedback Immunity: "Maybe the business that you asset managers are really in is the customer service business."
• Expertitis: "You know so much, no one can tell you anything."

That future, he explained, lies in part in "shattering the stereotype of the experience your customer expects to have with you. Understand your customer better than anyone else."

That understanding deepens, Tobe added, when we see the world through a different set of eyes.

"Communicate with your customers in a way in which they’re comfortable, not the way in which you’re used to communicating," he urged.

The final major component in reshaping asset management, said Tobe, "is exercising your risk muscles."

Tobe emphasized that point by quoting a remark that hockey great Wayne Gretzky once made: "You know," Gretzky told a sportswriter, "I missed all of the shots I never took."