One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in business and in life is that the next great transformational idea can come from the least likely of places—and often when you aren’t looking for it. And a technology or a technique, when taken from one industry and applied to another, can be very transformational.

I first learned this from my father, Edward Merrin, a great businessman and extraordinary salesman, albeit an accidental one. By nature my father was more of an artist. That was his passion. When I think about my childhood growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I remember my father always working on his paintings. He did a bit of everything—still lifes, abstracts, and the naked ladies he went to see pose at the Art Students League of New York. On weekends, he went downtown to Greenwich Village with his paintings in tow and tried to sell them. It didn’t go well. Let’s just say that Dad owns the biggest collection of Ed Merrin paintings in the world.

Dad’s real job was in the family business. My grandfather started a jewelry store, Merrin Jewelers, which was in midtown Manhattan, right across the street from Tiffany & Co. Our family business sold more affordable necklaces, bracelets, and rings than the legendary store with the baby blue boxes. Business wasn’t exactly booming. My father worked at Merrin Jewelers from the time he graduated college, but he had little interest in business or in jewelry, and he and his father never got along. It was not exactly a recipe for success.

Luckily, Dad found a way to channel his creativity and find his talents while working in that business. He directed his artistic skills to designing high-end jewelry. It didn’t always entice customers. To this day he maintains, “The better the design, the more poorly it sold.” He still talks about his favorite piece, a marquee pin with a loop of negative space. No one bought it, and he eventually sold it to his cousin Iris, who purchased it on the condition that he filled the empty space with diamonds. Dad recognized what was important and agreed to the request. “Money is money,” he said. “Even if it destroyed the whole design.” The tangential lesson learned: Give the customer what she thinks she wants.

At the same time, Dad was always innovative, always giving the customer what he did not yet know he wanted. Such was the case with the 14k gold toothpick “for the man who had everything.” It retailed for $7.50. His first buyer was Joseph Welch, the head counsel for the U.S. Army while it was under investigation by Joseph McCarthy for Communist activities. Sales ballooned from there. Merrin Jewelers sold 10,000 gold toothpicks, and to this day people still carry them around (or sell them on eBay for $149.99).

Still, Dad didn’t think those numbers were good enough. “We should have sold hundreds of thousands of them!” And shortly after, he did figure out a way to move more merchandise than he ever had before. Dad started advertising. He took out a small ad in the Wall Street Journal and then double-page ads in Diners Club magazine. These were not chic ads; they were utilitarian, showing the objects and their prices. They worked. Orders started to come in. He then created an entire catalog. At the time, jewelry wasn’t advertised like this and mail order hadn’t been done in this industry. Dad’s idea stemmed from seeing the ads for knitted caps from Maine in the margins of The New Yorker magazine and the Sears and L.L. Bean catalogs that showed up in the mailroom. But Dad believed it was applicable in his business too, and mail order for jewelry worked—it soon became 70 percent of the business.

While Merrin Jewelers expanded its business with mail order in a way it never could have had it relied on in-store sales alone, Dad was a consummate salesman as soon as he got in front of the customer. “You’d be stupid not to buy this,” he’d say, and somehow instead of seeming pushy or cocky, he’d pull it off. He always closed the deal.

The Next Great Idea Comes from Anywhere

Dad taught me to borrow from other industries and that selling is all about relationships, but those weren’t the only lessons. He showed me that the next great business idea comes from anywhere—and it’s often right in front of you. You just have to be ready to see it.

My parents married in 1957 and honeymooned in Acapulco. It was a great trip not only because it was the start of their new life as a couple, but it kick-started a new stage in my father’s artistic pursuits. While in Mexico, Dad fell in love with pre-Columbian art. He visited some dealers while there and purchased three pieces: two bowls and a terra-cotta figure—all for $69. He used one of the bowls in a window display, draping pieces of jewelry over it. It did attract interest, but not for the jewelry: Someone came in and asked, “How much for the bowl?” Dad sold it to him for $35, and with this sale he started a whole new career as an art dealer.

Interestingly, Dad had no background in this type of art. He was first-generation American and not the most inspired student in school. But now, he found something that fascinated him. He developed a passion for pre-Columbian cultures and art and started educating himself. He read every book on the subject. He went back to Mexico and bought more pre-Columbian art and began selling it out of our family’s apartment.

This led to his own business idea—and his lifelong work and passion. When he was 40, with four children to support, he opened his own business, the Merrin Gallery, which operated in office space upstairs from the jewelry store. My grandfather was steadfastly against the idea, but my mother was always supportive. He spent their life savings—$4,000—on building the business. It was a financial drain: the phone bill was often paid three months late and we ate a lot of pasta.

Dad did well in his new endeavor. He knew how to bring in business, and he kept incorporating creative ideas to attract customers. There was no storefront to his second-floor gallery so he set up beautiful displays in a four-foot window on 54th Street and people were captivated enough to get in the creaky old elevator and come to his gallery to see what he was selling. He found a mentor at the Museum of Natural History who helped extend his knowledge. With increased understanding he expanded into all forms of ancient art—Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian.

With Dad’s keen eye for what was beautiful and his consummate selling skills—“You need this for your collection!” he often said—the gallery, over time, became one of the top ancient art galleries in the world. What I learned: pursue your passion with self-confidence, education, and the goal of being the best in the world at it.

Today, we’d call my father’s change in career course a “pivot,” and while it was a risk to bet the farm on his passion for ancient art, my father, like any entrepreneur, was no gambler. He pursued his passion fully knowing it would work out, and he didn’t rely on luck to make that happen. He did everything he could to stack the deck in his favor.

With all businesses there are many variables that are outside of our control: markets go up and down and trends come and go. We need to control what we can as much as we possibly can. Lock in your suppliers, control your costs, launch with a critical mass of customers, and, most importantly, make sure you have an unfair competitive advantage that you can articulate and your prospects will understand within 30 seconds. My test of how good your unfair competitive advantage is and how well you articulate it is: when trying it out on family and friends, the response should be, “You would have to be an idiot not to buy it or try it.”

At the Merrin Gallery my father succeeded by becoming an expert in his field. Specifically, he educated himself on every culture, civilization, and period of ancient art that he sold. He combined that with an incredible eye for buying only the best-quality pieces. By focusing on a rather narrow niche of the art world and through a lot of hard work, Dad became one of the foremost ancient art dealers in the world. His knowledge, his eye, and his insistence on buying the most unique and rare pieces created his unique selling proposition for just about every sale he made and created an unfair competitive advantage for himself.

His customers knew that anything they bought from Dad would add to the value and prestige of their collection. When making a sale, Dad would explain why a piece was the best of its kind in 30 seconds—which was absolutely critical. Then, once his customer was interested, he would delve into much greater detail.

Where Can You Find the Edge?

I recently had a conversation with a friend in the engineering industry who was looking for ways to grow his company and thinking about acquisitions. That’s justified. You can grow a company organically—by gradually increasing sales—or inorganically—through acquisitions. Growing through acquisition should be a focus, but it shouldn’t be the only focus. It should not take the place of or take precedence over thinking creatively about how to organically grow the business, create competitive advantages, and positively disrupt your industry. I’ve learned that the way to really grow your business is to spend time thinking about how to gain an edge by doing something faster, better, and more efficiently than your competitors. These are transformational opportunities that most organizations simply miss.

For too many, it’s all about the 3 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion. But that’s not how great businesses are built or managed in today’s environment. In order to stack the deck, you have to find one or two or three things that the clients are most concerned about or value the most, and solve those.

What do I mean? A terrific example comes from the cement industry. How do you disrupt the cement industry? Look at what Cemex did. This Mexico-based company saw problems with the traditional way the industry operated. Historically, construction companies bought massive amounts of cement, just to have on site. This tied up an enormous amount of money and required space to store the materials. Moreover, companies never had the exact quantity of cement they needed—they ended up with too much or too little. (Even being off by a small amount translates to a big problem when you consider the size of buildings or complexes). But this is how it was done—until Cemex changed the game.

In the early 1990s, Cemex was on the verge of bankruptcy, and it looked to other organizations—FedEx, Domino’s Pizza, and 911 dispatch centers—for insights on how to improve. It ultimately implemented a just-in-time delivery mechanism borrowed from the manufacturing industry. Cemex delivered the exact amount of cement as the project is being developed as it was needed. With that seemingly basic advance, customers no longer had their cash tied up in cement they didn’t yet need, and they no longer were storing excess or running out of material. Think about the most important things for your customers. They want just-in-time delivery. They don’t want to spend more than they have to, and they don’t want any costly delays due to lack of building material. By addressing those two concerns, and by efficiently using technology including satellites and software modeled after the 911 emergency systems, Cemex was able to fulfill orders within a short time.⁴ From near-bankruptcy, Cemex became one of the world’s largest building materials suppliers and cement producers. In 2003, Wired lauded its efficient “just-in-time” delivery system and named Cemex one of the world’s top five “masters of innovation, technology, and strategic vision”⁵ and in 2008 the company ranked it just behind Google in a survey of companies reshaping the global economy.⁶ It is a cement company. Enough said . . . .

Of course, this is similar to what Dell did when it changed the computer industry. IBM, Digital Computer, and other computer companies used to order massive amounts of parts that they would store in inventory. This would cost money, tie up resources, and create lots of overhead. Dell implemented just-in-time delivery, which resulted in driving the price point of its computers way down and its margins way up. Utilizing this approach, Dell achieved positive cash flows as their customers paid them before Dell had to pay their suppliers, giving Dell access to “free cash” to finance their operations and a massive competitive edge.

Southwest Airlines offers another great example of a company disrupting a stodgy industry by thinking differently. Southwest was founded in 1967 and started operations in 1971 as a small airline with three planes. It flew only within the state of Texas. There’s not a large disruptive technology component to Southwest’s story but rather a hard look at solving a key problem for a large segment of customers, delivering the cheapest flights possible. To solve for this, Southwest looked to where serious cost savings and efficiencies could be implemented, and where services could be improved to increase customer satisfaction. It established four major points of differentiation that gave it an edge.

1. Only fly one type of plane. Southwest decided early on to only fly and support one plane type: the Boeing 737. This saved a tremendous amount of money on maintenance costs, personnel training, spare parts inventories, compatible equipment to load and equip the planes, and more.
2. Use point-to-point flying as opposed to the traditional hub-and-spoke network. This approach avoided the costly plane delays of waiting and coordinating connecting flights, improved margins by having more flight time per plane, and boosted customer satisfaction by reducing flight delays and flying passengers directly.
3. Avoid frills; just offer cheap, simple service. At the time when every passenger enjoyed full meals and snacks, Southwest positioned itself as the “no-frills” airline. It did away with assigned seats and meals. It focused on unloading, cleaning, and restocking the plane and boarding the next set of passengers in 20 minutes as opposed to the roughly 90 minutes it took the competition. This enabled the airline to get an additional flight per day out of each aircraft—vastly increasing its margins.
4. Focus on a fun-loving culture. Southwest realized early on that treating their employees better results in a better customer experience.

Until 2008, when the founder, Herb Kelleher, stepped down from running Southwest, the airline had the best on-time performance record of any domestic carrier and its market capitalization was almost twice that of all six of their domestic competitors combined.⁷ Unfortunately, the airline has stumbled and has lost both of those positions since Kelleher retired.

What’s Israel and Irrigation Got to Do with It?

I learned many lessons on how to build a disruptive business, but in the beginning, when I was first thinking about my career, I had no idea what I wanted to do. My older brother, Jeremy, went to work with my grandfather in the jewelry store. My younger brother, Sam, who inherited Dad’s passion for art, went to work with Dad in the gallery. I was the middle son, different from my two brothers, and had no passion, inclination, or desire to do anything related to jewelry or art.

I wasn’t the most motivated student, but I was passionate about my extracurricular pursuits. When I was in junior high school I became involved in Young Judaea, a Jewish, Zionist, youth group. Young Judea was a transformational experience for me. This was a peer-led movement and there were role models who were cool—they were smart and worldly and I was motivated to be like them. We just hung out and talked, and at first it was something to do on a Sunday night. We went to regional conventions a few times a year, and when I noticed there were cute girls who also attended, I ramped up my involvement. I grew up in a kosher home, one that adhered to Jewish customs and instilled a sense of Jewish identity, promoting charity and giving back. I had my bar mitzvah in Israel, and my parents even thought of emigrating to Israel. Yet it was during my time in Young Judaea that I started to believe in a higher purpose and gain a greater sense of Jewish identity and a connection to Israel. I started to care about things that I found unjust, like the persecution of the Soviet Jews, and I had a feeling that together we could change things—that we could make a difference. Arik Einstein’s folk song “You and I” captured the spirit of Young Judea and served as our anthem: “You and I will change the world.” I was introduced to the idea of Tikkun olam, or “repairing the world,” and that we had a responsibility to make the world a better place. My commitment to the program grew and ultimately I served as president of the metropolitan New York area.

The Young Judaea program culminated in “Year Course,” a gap year between high school and college, with much of it spent on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in Israel.

So, at 18, when my high school friends were starting college, I went to work on a four-year old kibbutz in Israel’s southern desert—in the middle of nowhere. My job involved driving a tractor, picking Galia melons (a hybrid melon that looks like cantaloupe on the outside and honeydew on the inside, which is much sweeter than either one), and packing fruit. We woke at 3 A.M. to go down to the fields to pick these melons and brought teaspoons to scoop and eat melon as we worked. We started the day in winter coats, and by 5 A.M. we were dripping in sweat. I learned about cultivating crops (we grew peppers and onions as well), pest control, and fertilizer and irrigation.

I loved it. It wasn’t just about hanging out with new friends, getting dirty, and the satisfaction that came with hard work. It was something else: we helped make the desert bloom. We planted in sand dunes and created something different and beautiful and lasting. This was so clear to me as I rode the bus from Jerusalem through the Judean Hills, to the Arava Desert, and then all of a sudden there were green patches, a result of the hard work done on the kibbutzes. We were pioneers—working the land and building the future. It was easy to become passionate about it when we saw such progress.

Who thinks about having a farm in the middle of the desert? That fascinates me. And how Israel did it fascinates me more. Israel created farms in the desert where water was the scarcest of resources.

How do you possibly make growing vegetables efficient and cost effective in the middle of the desert—a place where you have no natural resources: no water, no soil, and no fertilizer? The answer is you figure out how to solve for it in a new way. The most advanced farming and irrigation system in the world was created out of necessity. Up until this time irrigation happened naturally, with rain, by digging trenches, or with sprinklers. Think about what a waste it would be to use sprinklers spraying water, which is so precious in the desert, at places where there were no plants. Instead, something called drip irrigation was invented on a kibbutz so that every drip of water was targeted to have a nurturing effect on a plant. It sounds complicated, but it’s so simple—just a plastic pipe with holes drilled in it where the plants are. On professional farms, you plant in evenly measured spaces—two or four inches apart, depending on the plant—so this is quite easy to target. Every drop of water is used by the plant; not one is wasted. It’s so smart, and so simple. As my father would say, “You’d be stupid not to do it.”

This type of thinking and the other technological advances it inspired—solenoids, or little sensors that turned the water on and off, technologies that tested the soil and gave you feedback as to its alkalinity—helped Israel become a world leader in agriculture in spite of the fact that it’s not naturally conducive to agriculture.

Those are the kind of results that happen when you break ideas down and build new systems from the ground up. That’s the kind of positive destruction practice anyone wanting success needs to adopt.