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Brain StormingBrain Storming -The Dynamic New Way to Create Successful Ideas
It is a state of mind that we all can cultivate. As a business manager, I have been especially interested in stimulating ideas for two reasons: to benefit the business itself and to help the people who work in that business. In our organization we have had quite a bit of experience with this subject. And I can say that these techniques not only work on specific problems. They also help to broaden a person's outlook on life - to open his whole personality to the "idea concept" and to encourage a constant, fresh eagerness about all the problems of daily living. Although my comments are being made from a businessman's point of view, I think it is evident that they apply quite generally to all people. Any company or organization that makes and sells products in competition will prosper only as it develops new ideas. This is basic to growth and improvement. Book Excerpts: THE DIFFERENCE AN IDEA MAKES You may not realize it, but if you look about you where you work, in a large office, on an assembly line, in the government, on a salesman's beat, in a small store, in a laboratory, in the shipping room or the executive suite, you will see the difference an idea makes. You will see the difference in the men who move ahead. You will see it in the products which make sales records. You will see it in the business which prospers. You will see it in profit and loss statements, on the stock exchange, in the delicatessen which closes, in the headlines. You will see it in your home and other homes, in the family which does things, in your church and lodge, in your political party, in your government. The one quality which turns the ordinary into the extraordinary is ideas. For example, visit the engineering department of a large manufacturing company, say in the field of electronics, and you will see row upon row of drawing boards and row upon row of engineers, all in shirt sleeves, who look remarkably alike. And they have much in common. Each man in the room has an engineering degree, each has been graduated from the company training program. Most of the men are married, have about the same number of children and the same number of bedrooms in their split-level homes, about fourteen payments left on the car, and seventeen years to go on their mortgage. They all get the same pay, give or take a few dollars. If you came back in a year to that vast room full of seemingly identical engineers you would see that a strange process had taken place. One man way back on the left had moved his slide rule and drawing pens up to a drawing board at the front of the room. Another came in one day and sat down at a desk, not a drawing board, in an office down the corridor. Still another, apparently lost in the center of the room full of shirt-sleeved workers, moved out to the front office and started to wear a suit jacket and carry a brown leather dispatch case to work instead of a lunch box. This process might seem strange, mysterious, and completely nonunderstandable viewed from a distance. You might feel like an anthropologist on a South Sea island viewing some native rites that were unaccountable. But if you investigated you would find an enormous difference between the look-alike men in the look-alike shirts in the hangar-sized workroom: the men who moved ahead had ideas. Sure, not all the ideas were good ones, not all of them worked, others were too expensive, still others had been tried before. But they were ideas, that ingenious, creative element which makes all the difference in our lives. Notice I said they had ideas, not an idea, and they expressed those ideas. Actually they had a flood of ideas, and, in effect, the whole engineering department depended on the creative energies of a tiny minority. That fellow on the left was working over a drawing when he had an idea for a new material which would make a better part, at less cost. The next day he worked on another part and realized that one of the manufacturing processes could be eliminated by a redesign. A fortnight later he saw how the company could save money by purchasing stock screws rather than tooling their own connections. All year long he kept seeing the same products and processes as the rest of the men in the room, but in them he saw problems, and then he thought up solutions to those problems. That man in the middle of the room lost a blueprint one day, and he figured out a coding system so plans couldn't be misplaced so easily. He had a headache and suggested better lights over the drawing boards. Loaded down with work, he devised a new method of drawing designs; trying to arrange his own vacation, he came up with a better vacation schedule. During the year his pet peeves, irritations, frustrations led to new ideas. That fellow way back in the room went shopping with his wife one evening and sent in ideas on new markets for products the next morning. He met an amateur radio bug and realized how a tube his company manufactured could be adapted for ham radio use. He saw his wife make a ready-mix cake and had an idea for plastic packaging. Building a model plane with his son, he saw how one of the company's oldest products could have a new use in guided missiles. Everything he did set off a chain reaction which resulted in ideas. As the ideas from the three men came in to their bosses and filtered up through the company, these men became known for their ideas. They were known as idea men, men who cared about the job, men who were thinking all the time, men you could give tough problems to and expect results. When new jobs opened up, departments expanded, their selection was natural. Ideas set them apart from the hundreds of men who had the same advantages and disadvantages they did; ideas made the difference in their careers. Their ideas also made the difference between the company and its competitors; it swung the balance from loss to profit, from failure to success. Some of the ideas also made the difference in the defense of the free world. For example, the Air Force needed a new radar unit for a supersonic interceptor. One of the engineers had suggested a simple product which could be easily mass-produced. Because of his idea, their bid was by far the lowest. They got the job, made a handsome profit, but most important, the planes got the part in a hurry. or
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I can think of no finer way to enrich a person's life than to stimulate him to a greater use
of his creative talents. The ability to be creative - in which the techniques of "brain-storming" play such an
important part - is largely a state of mind.