What is lateral thinking? Or, what is outof-the-box thinking? By way of an answer I’ll narrate the following real life episode that took place years ago in the West Indies: Once a famous sports shoe major got drubbed in the competition, as a comparatively new company posted a better annual returns.

  The CEO of this major in Kingston held a brain-storming session with his think-tank. The session took stock of the situation and identified a remote Caribbean island as a possible mass client to alleviate the drubbing. The sports shoe major quickly announced a walkin interview for potential salesmen. Many unemployed youths swarmed to the interview venue.

   The job was to sell a thousand pairs of sports shoes a month to the inhabitants of this island. The island had a population of ten thousand-strong tribe of working men and women, apart from their children and old folk. Most of them worked in the jungles on the hilly terrain of....