Men Like To Aim

It was one of my heroes of business, Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) who first came up with the ready-fire-aim go-to-market strategy.

It was one of my heroes of business, Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) who first came up with the ready-fire-aim go-to-market strategy. It is a positive statement of intent, since it is action orientated, helps streamline and decrease product development time and costs, and focuses the product and the firm on customer needs rather than technology. However this can be very messy, particularly in the male-only world of the gentleman’s urinal.

In fact many restaurants, hotels and high volume transport hubs report that there has been a lot of, err…human spillage. But recently there has been progress by tapping into an unlikely source: the inner triune brain and the differences in brain pathways between men and women.

Put simply, men like to aim.

If you are male (or female and brave enough to take a look) you may have noticed something has changed in the posh urinals of the world. You may well see a perfect picture of a housefly, (Musca domestica) embedded in the porcelain bowl. No, it's not a real fly. It's a drawing, baked into the porcelain bowl. Or it may be a peel-and-paste decal attached to the bowl.

The presence of a fly in a urinal literally changes human behaviour or at least the behaviour of human males. There seems to be an in-built hardwired instinct to aim at targets and having a fly to aim at reduces spillage. When flies were introduced at Schiphol Airport, spillage rates dropped 80 percent. A change like that, of course, translates into major savings in maintenance costs.

There's A Fly In My Urinal. A twist on the dumb waiter jokes of course. Many are attributed to the notoriously rude waiters at Lindy's Restaurant in New York, when told there was a fly in their soup, replies include: 'It's possible. The chef used to be a tailor' and 'Don't worry. How much soup can a fly drink?'

Why is there such a difference between male and female brains? Men and women see things differently because of ancient hunter-gatherer programming in their brains, research suggests. Scientists carried out experiments that showed men are better at judging faraway targets, while women are good at short-distance focusing. They believe the findings reflect the way men and women's brains evolved for different hunter-gatherer roles many thousands of years ago.

Hunters, who were traditionally men, needed an ability to observe from afar. Women, on the other hand, had to be adept at searching the area immediately within reach for fruits, nuts, berries and edible roots. Researchers asked a group of 48 men and women to mark the midpoint of lines on a piece of paper within a laser pointer. Men were more accurate than women when the target was placed far away at a distance of 100cm. When the paper was within a 50cm hands-reach distance, the women were more accurate. Evidence already exists that separate pathways in the brain process visual information from near and far space. The results suggest that the near pathway is favoured in women and the far pathway is favoured in men.

But why The Fly? Apart from The Fly being one of my favourite science fiction horror film directed and co-written by David Cronenberg, the real mystery of the public urinals is why flies? Why not wasps or squirrels or any mammal?

The original fly idea was proposed almost 20 years ago by Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff, who had served in the Dutch army in the 1960s. As a soldier he noticed that someone had put small, discrete red dots in the barracks urinals, which dramatically cut back on so-called misdirected flow. Two decades later, he proposed to the Schiphol airport board of directors that the dots be turned into etched flies. Van Bedoff decided that guys want to directly aim at an animal they can immobilise. The ability to use one's natural gifts and achieve victory over the foe while standing is the key. Guys can always beat flies. That's why flies are so satisfying.

More than a hundred years ago in the UK, toilets also sported insect images. Back then, however, the favoured target was not a fly, but a bee. And bees have stingers. It seems that men in the 1890s were willing to take more imaginative risks when peeing.

Going back to Tom Peters theory, if you fire without aiming, there’s always a greater chance that you will shoot yourself in the foot. I’ve even seen some entrepreneurs who quickly reload, only to shoot themselves in the other foot. Making your business a game of Russian Roulette is not the way to success. If you can’t plan ahead, at least plan to learn from your mistakes.

But when it comes to urinals, please: ready – aim – fire.

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