How Do You Remove Empty Soapboxes?

A simple story of creativity has been going around and we thought it would be good to share with our readers.

One of the most memorable case studies on creativity was the case of the empty soapbox, which happened in one of Japan’s biggest cosmetics companies.

The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a box of soap that was empty. It immediately isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department.

For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty. Management tasked its engineers to solve the problem.

Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast.

But a rank-and-file employee that was posed the same problem came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Original source of story undetermined. Image courtesy of geishaboy500.