Page 159 - The Power to Change Anything

148 INFLUENCER

John Lancaster discovered a cure for scurvy. He gave a little bit
of lime juice to his sailors every day, and no one died of scurvy.
And yet it took almost 200 years for the practice to catch on.
Initially the British were actually mocked for their curious prac-
tice, and the derisive term limey was born.
Rogers was shocked to discover that the merit of an idea did
not predict its adoption rate. What predicted whether an inno-
vation was widely accepted or not was whether a specific group
of people embraced it. Period. Rogers learned that the first
people to latch onto a new idea are unlike the masses in many
ways. He called these people innovators. They’re the guys and
gals in the Bermuda shorts. They tend to be open to new ideas
and smarter than average. But here’s the important point. The
key to getting the majority of any population to adopt a vital
behavior is to find out who these innovators are and avoid
them like the plague. If they embrace your new idea, it will
surely die.
The second group to try an innovation is made up of what
Rogers termed “early adopters.” Many early adopters are what
are commonly known as opinion leaders. These important peo-
ple represent about 13.5 percent of the population. They are
smarter than average, and tend to be open to new ideas. But
they are different from innovators in one critical respect: They
are socially connected and respected. And here’s the real influ-
ence key. The rest of the population—over 85 percent—will
not adopt the new practices until opinion leaders do.
So it turns out that when the fellow with the Bermuda
shorts used the new seeds, he didn’t do Rogers a favor. As far
as farming methods were concerned, Cadillac man was an
innovator. He was the first to adopt new ideas in his commu-
nity, and like many innovators, he cast suspicion on the “new
ways” he endorsed. Since he was different from the majority of
his peers in visible ways, and since much of what he did ap-
peared to disrespect traditional methods, this made him a
threat. He was neither respected nor connected.