Let’s revisit Charlie Merrill’s concept of the financial supermarket. This truly radical idea broke numerous industry conventions: It focused on middle-class rather than wealthy Americans; it adopted low-cost, high-volume merchandising; it introduced the chain of outlets concept; and it offered a great variety of products. How was Merrill able to spot this cognitively distant opportunity? It turns out that he thought quite literally about supermarkets when he developed the idea. (A 1941 Fortune article reported it like this: “The theory was that, if it is good business for a grocery chain to offer the purchaser of vegetables a choice of meats, then it should be equally sound for Merrill Lynch to offer a commercial hedger a chance to invest in a new issue or to open a stock account.”) It was only when he reimagined the managed investment business as a supermarket business that a new way to compete became visible to him.