Natural Leader (Continued)

"I asked myself, What if I lived my life as though I didn't believe in the glass ceiling? What if we all operated as if it were a nonissue? How would that influence our ability to move forward in the system? Of course discrimination exists. But what Rayona teaches is that it's up to you to interpret that discrimination and put it in context in your life. Individuals are in control of their contexts. You get to write the story that you're living."

How do I design a breakthrough product?

Diane Rooney
Founder, Rooney Consulting Group
Product breakthrough: The Oral-B CrossAction Toothbrush
Attended Sharpnack's session: Winter 1997
Age: 51

Herstory: "Several years ago, I was working for Oral-B, a dental-products division of the Gillette Company. I was in charge of a team that had been assembled to create a breakthrough product. No one knew what it would be, or how my team would do it, but the 11 of us took on the assignment. Out of the then 250 employees in Oral-B's California offices, 41 had taken Rayona's class, and more than half of the breakthrough team had taken it.

"At that point, the toothbrush category was pretty mundane. Most improvements were incremental changes in color, packaging, or features. We knew that we wanted to invent something that would be a leap ahead in design and effectiveness. One of the questions that we started with was, What if we designed a toothbrush based on the way that most people actually brush their teeth (in a back-and-forth motion), instead of on the way that dentists recommend people brush their teeth (in a circular motion)?

"That led to the conclusion that the best way to arrange the bristles was to have tufts of varying lengths at opposing angles. Of course, that idea was hugely unpopular with the manufacturing group. Toothbrushes had been manufactured the same way for years: Pour the mold for the handle, drill holes in the head for the bristles, insert the bristles up and down. What we were asking for would require new solutions.

"Although the company leaders in Boston supported our project, they were hesitant to apply the same kinds of revolutionary thinking and tactics to the rest of the corporation. Gillette is a huge, multinational company, and there was a tremendous sense of 'this is not the way we do things.' But we just kept directing people back to the clinical tests and showing them what the benefits could be for consumers.

"In the end, the brush was a huge success. Through rapid prototyping, we cut the time that it took to create a working test toothbrush from three months to five days. As a result, we tested 56 different prototypes. Through our clinical studies, we were able to show that the new brush cleaned better. We also filed 23 patents on the CrossAction Toothbrush, more than for any other Oral-B product. In its launch year, the brush generated $53.4 million in sales, despite the fact that we didn't initially introduce the brush to many international markets.

"The project ended my career in big companies. I left Oral-B to go to a startup and then later became a free agent with my own company. I keep coming back to the fact that Rayona's course gave me a sense of my own voice and the confidence to use that voice."

How do I take the next step?

Robin Selden
VP and general manager, Core Technology Group,
FaceTime Communications
Marketing breakthrough: Led her company to dive into a new product category
Attended Sharpnack's session: Spring 1995
Age: 39

Herstory: "When I took Rayona's class, I was a marketing manager of technology at Adaptec, a company that makes storage interfaces for computers. I knew that my long-term goal was to be COO and president of a high-tech company, but I wasn't sure what I had to do to get there. Rayona's class is all about believing that no goal is too wild to achieve. So I mapped out where I wanted to be and worked backward to figure out what kinds of projects I needed to work on in order to get there.

"One opportunity that I could take advantage of at Adaptec was to take the lead on a product launch, which I hadn't done before. At the time, the company didn't produce any multimedia products, and I was convinced that that was where the market was going to go. There was a technology protocol called FireWire that I was particularly interested in. It allowed you to stream video and audio from a digital camera to your computer. The protocol wasn't being used very widely then, because not many consumers had camcorders. But I was willing to bet that if prices dropped, people would want to hook up their cameras to their computers.