Tapping the world outside your company for the ideas that will keep you smart.
The great idea that launches a business needs to be the first in a series. Here's a menu of proven methods for gathering information and tapping the world outside your company for the ideas that will keep you smart
Early last year the Inc. FaxPoll asked readers, "Are you too busy to be smart?" Between managing people, selling products, negotiating deals, and handling surprises, do you have time to read, to talk, to sit and just think?
Where, for that matter, did your last great idea come from? Customers? Magazines? (We flatter ourselves.) Simply popped into your head?
What we figured, and what we heard back, was that although daydreaming and intelligence gathering put people in business, there's little time for such things after ventures get fully under way. "So much new technology, so little time to learn," lamented one founder. "I wish I could read faster," wrote another. One chief executive noted that whereas he used to spend the majority of his time thinking about how to improve his products and be different from his competitors, he now was consumed by keeping up on and complying with changing government regulations.
The answer for most was, Yes, I am too busy to be smart.
But other CEOs said they recognize that managing a company in today's environment means more than getting today's work done well: it also means anticipating tomorrow's. "You must set some time aside for brainstorming and research, otherwise you die" is how one founder somewhat histrionically put it. Searching for ideas, they contend, is not a luxury. Those CEOs have figured out ways to stimulate their thoughts without becoming deafened by the cacophony of the outside world. They've learned how to make the time, how to filter what they hear, and how to transport ideas back into their organizations.
Many of their strategies for finding wisdom outside their own office walls aren't complicated. Most involve little more than talking, albeit with the right people and in the right places. A few take more work to establish and to nurture. All, happily, can be copied.
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Get into a Peer Group
Company managers need two kinds of ideas: big-picture ideas (What new technology is out there that I could use but haven't thought about?) and specific problem-solving ideas for day-to-day operational quandaries (How do I set up a benefits plan?). Peer groups prompt both. Running the gamut from formal associations to informal clusters put together by CEOs in the same region or industry, peer groups -- small discussion groups held regularly among the same people -- are providing increasing numbers of managers the chance to share and hear everything from tactics in hiring to options for solving company crises.
In the Boston area a group of about a dozen software-company founders in noncompeting niches has been meeting one evening almost every month for four years. At a recent Software Executive Network (SoftEN) gathering, the conversation ran from how the different companies project returns on direct mail to efforts to crack down on software bootleggers. At one point member Vadim Yasinovsky heatedly outlined a trademark emergency he was facing. A much larger company was preparing to introduce a division with a name that sounded confusingly similar to that of his 19-person company, Clear Software. "I don't know what to do," he moaned. "This could destroy me." Yasinovsky's first impulse was to unleash lawyers or make a stink in the trade press -- but 15 minutes after launching the discussion he had a prescription for a more subtle course of action. Use your industry contacts, counseled the group. Have them lobby on your behalf with the higher-ups in the large company. Yasinovsky set that plan in motion; the two companies eventually reached a compromise.
"The SoftEN people called me off, which was the most important thing," Yasinovsky says. That kind of interaction is typical, he adds; the CEO colleagues are for him like a lifeboat. "They're enormously helpful; it's unbelievable. They can point to things that I would not even have considered. If I have a serious issue or self-doubt, I wait for our meeting at the end of the month."
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Cultivate Mentors
"I'm a wimp, and I like the hand-holding," says Mary Baechler about her dependence on outside mentors.
An experienced outsider to bounce thoughts off and extract ideas from is a more personalized, more focused version of the peer group. Mary Baechler has cultivated three mentors she cites as invaluable during her nine years running Racing Strollers, a Yakima, Wash., manufacturer of baby strollers for joggers. The first, a local businessman, was recommended by a banker who turned Baechler down for a loan. ("That mentor taught me to love my financial statements," she says.) The second she met by cold-calling a multinational corporation and asking the chairman's secretary whom the company had used to set up international distribution. ("I cold-called the referral as well, and he told me so much about distribution in our first conversation that I kind of threw myself at him and said, 'Gee, will you teach me?' ") The third she met at a management-education program.
Not only have the mentors walked her through the business issues she first approached them about, but they've consistently helped her troubleshoot problems as well. Last spring, for instance, Baechler discovered that some employees had stopped taking orders for post-office delivery of certain items because their boxes were bigger than what the post office allowed. She was aghast -- but she had people to call for advice. To refocus her staff on the customer, she says, "one of my mentors gave me this phrase: 'You are no longer a salesperson/receptionist/ac-countant; your new title is customer person.' Another reminded me to accept responsibility whenever there is an error in communication; I apologized for not communicating clearly, and we concentrated on fixing the problem."
Baechler estimates she spends an average of two to three hours a week on the phone with her mentors, and she often will run important ideas by all three. Sometimes they offer three different alternatives; other times they support the course she's already opted for. "I'm always amazed at the generosity of people who will take the time to teach novices," she says.
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Visit Other Companies
It's hard to keep attuned to big-picture ideas without getting out of the office. There's only so much, after all, that can be learned from the same group of people without some sort of external stimulus. One option: hit the road and visit other businesses.
Don Romine, president of Web Industries, puts it this way: "When we do plant-to-plant visits, it's in the spirit of friendly piracy." At Web, a $20-million contract manufacturer based in Westborough, Mass., one of Romine's biggest tasks since moving into the presidency, a year ago, has been to turn the amorphous concept of ownership -- which is talked about a lot at the partially employee-owned company -- into something that makes the company work better. Romine hasn't been shy about looking for counsel from other companies and over the past year has visited four other manufacturers and hosted several visits as well.
