This month, inspired by an inconvenient, unhelpful and stress-inducing car rental experience, Adam suggested we spend some time exploring usefulness – not just plain usefulness as opposed to uselessness but understanding and appreciating the surprising and generous spirit of the ‘Startlingly Useful’. So we start with rant from Adam that turns into a very reasonable and really rather interesting perspective on competitive usefulness in the modern world and then we have an example of a startlingly useful innovation from the beauty business and a story about the surprising usefulness of a pig in the 18th century.

And then above and beyond this, we are going to try to be extra useful too. This month our takeaway is going to be a little different. Of course we hope the Challenger Project has in its short life proved to be interesting, inspiring and even useful. At least sometimes. But this month Adam has decided to over-commit. Every other day there’ll be a new interview up in the Take Away section that will offer Three Bits of Advice on a particular aspect of brand and/or business life. We are hoping you’ll find these additional thought pieces useful or that you’ll know someone that will. So although we’ve now given away the ‘surprise’ element of the plan we hope you’ll still find this month useful, maybe even startlingly so.