文档介绍：How to Pitch a Brilliant Idea
Kimberly D Elsbach
University of California, Davis
4,688 words
1 September 2003
Harvard Business Review
117
0017-8012
English
Copyright (c) 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
Coming up with creative ideas is easy; selling them to strangers is hard. All too often, entrepreneurs, sales
executives, and marketing managers go to great lengths to show how their new business plans or creative
concepts are practical and high margin—only to be rejected by corporate decision makers who don’t seem
to understand the real value of the ideas. Why does this happen?
It turns out that the problem has as much to do with the seller’s traits as with an idea’s inherent quality.
The person on the receiving end tends to gauge the pitcher’s creativity as well as the proposal itself. And
judgments about the pitcher’s ability e up with workable ideas can quickly and permanently
overshadow perceptions of the idea’s worth. We all like to think that people judge us carefully and
objectively on our merits. But the fact is, they rush to place us into neat little categories—they stereotype
us. So the first thing to realize when you’re preparing to make a pitch to strangers is that your audience is
going to put you into a box. And they’re going to do it really fast. Research suggests that humans can
categorize others in less than 150 milliseconds. Within 30 minutes, they’ve made lasting judgments about
your character.
These insights emerged from my lengthy study of the $50 billion . film and television industry.
Specifically, I worked with 50 Hollywood executives involved in assessing pitches from screenwriters. Over
the course of six years, I observed dozens of 30-minute pitches in which the screenwriters encountered the
“catchers” for the first time. In interviewing and observing the pitchers and catchers, I was able to discern
just how quickly assessments of