Hacker Cinema
The Hudsucker Proxy
1994 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
A naive business graduate is installed as president of a manufacturing company as part of a stock scam.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
The management thinking from your example seemed very natural and not so surprising after all. They just needed someone with a "just in case" mindset, similar to the tailor from one of my favorite scenes/movies "The Hudsucker Proxy" - "The Double Stitch" [0]. I even sometimes act like that character. For example, when the boss says we will drop a feature, I don’t fully kill it, instead, I temporarily disable it because the chances of it coming back are not zero.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM5DiHYfKfM
It's also a trope explored in The Hudsucker Proxy and Elf for a wider variety of movies to watch. Both I believe reference that the Empire State Building in New York has (had?) a pneumatic inter-floor (inter-office) mail system. I don't recall if it still operates and I don't know if either or both filmed in the actual ESB mail room or not.
(Also if you want a videogame that plays with the trope, Grim Fandango has a fascinating pneumatic tube mail room and it factors into some of the puzzles. I believe it is also indirectly referencing the Empire State Building.)
That is what I call independence of price from cost.
In traditional economics, as you say, the price comes out from the sum of all costs + a (reasonable) markup/margin (this is called "Cost-plus pricing")
This remains the case in a number of industries, but it doesn't apply to customer goods/services since at least 60 or 70 years, possibly more.
The costs remain the costs.
The price becomes whatever the customer is willing to pay (and it is often completely detached from actual costs).
The "correct" term is "value pricing" or "value-based pricing":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing
JFYI, there is a memorable (to me) short sequence in the movie "The Hudsucker Proxy" about the process of calculating cost and price of the hula hoop, besides the more known following sequence about price adjustment following demand (on which there are many economics lessons), starting around 2:45 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK1EnXnvyko
I really love the presentation scenes in the movie The Hudsucker Proxy. One is a circle on a crumpled up piece of paper and he says "You know, for kids!" His idea is a hula hoop. Later, he has a circle on a larger display and says the same thing: "For kids!" It's a frisbee.
Here's a clip of one of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn8rXglFMuQ
The odds are very high that your first attempt to explain your idea will sound equally silly and unintelligible to most other people. Things like elevator speeches tend to take a lot of time to develop. Conveying anything succinctly and well, especially anything new, is very challenging. Most people have no idea how bad they are at until they start that communication process in earnest.
The reason we have sayings like "Ideas are worthless, execution is everything" is partly because execution often contains or reveals a great deal more information and unstated assumptions than your nutshell explanation.
There is a great scene in The Hudsucker Proxy where he shows a circle and then a line as his diagram of his idea. This turns out to be the hula hoop and is wildly successful. The scene basically repeats -- drawing of a circle for top view, line for side view -- but the idea is now the frisbee.
Effectively communicating ideas in any kind of meaningful, meaty way is incredibly hard. This is part of why demos are so useful.
To sell an idea you must effectively communicate it. People sell ideas all the time, though perhaps not in the sense you mean. For example, people trying to get funding for a movie routinely have to sell the idea. This is where you get expressions like "it's Uber for X." This is an attempt at getting across a density of information succinctly.
Effectively conveying a dense amount of information in a small package is an art form in its own right. People often pay to have that done or to get help with it. It's a very separate skill from seeing a solution in context because of having done work that exposed you to certain experiences.
Upvoted for Hudsucker Proxy. Very underrated movie. Essential if you're interested in business and specifically product development.