Where Great Ideas Come From

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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.

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.

At one company the foreman described how it had collected 127 ideas from the factory floor the year before and had implemented more than 100 of them. "I thought, What a great idea," says Romine, "to measure not just production rate but idea generation." On many of the visits, he brings along nonmanagement Web workers, who also tour facilities, trade tips, and hold roundtables to trigger their own ideas. At one company Web line workers heard about how work teams do their own hiring and firing, and came back and adopted a version of the concept.

Though it takes time to set up and make the visits, Romine is adamant that the trips have led to both tangible changes and intangible enthusiasm. The ideas he and others come back with, he says, are "little light bulbs going off: none in particular is necessarily revolutionary, but together they've made a very significant change in the way we do business."

Create a Personalized "Textbook"
For ideas about day-to-day operations, skimming over a helpful article or book can be like calling a mentor -- the written words can spark ways of thinking about specific needs. Steve Jonak has crafted a system that's simple and low tech and, he says, ensures he's got ideas when he needs them. He's building a master file of articles categorized by management topic.

"There's a lot of information out there, and sometimes I don't even have time to absorb the article when I find it," says Jonak, who owns Industrial Steel Inc., a steel service center in Columbia Heights, Minn., doing $1 million in business. When he comes across an article that seems as if it could be useful in the future, he clips it and files it in an 18-inch box in his office -- dubbed his Run the Company box -- under topics such as Keeping Customers, Delegation, and Safety.

"When you're working on a specific project," says Jonak, "it's nice to be able to pull a whole bunch of articles and have the information right there." It's timesaving, he says; he doesn't have to flip back through books or magazines to find the article he remembers seeing. Jonak also keeps two special files for weekly reading and daily browsing. In them is "motivational stuff": paragraphs about making the transition from entrepreneur to manager, homilies about turning ideas into reality, reminders of big-picture company goals. "These two files keep me on track."

Get Out to Industry Conferences
As with visiting companies, one of the key reasons for going to conferences is to avoid the tunnel vision that can overcome managers who live and breathe their business. "I can get MathSoft-centric here," says David Blohm, CEO of MathSoft, a Cambridge, Mass., software company. He is an active member of several software associations and educational groups, but he also makes time for industry conferences. Not only do they provide informal networking opportunities (what he calls the "schmooze time in the schmoozatorium") and a chance to benchmark his $20-million company's progress, but also they enable him to catch up with evolving technologies efficiently.

"There'll be whole sessions focusing on, say, new hand-held computers," says Blohm, "where they're discussing how people view the market -- and you can talk to people afterward. You can't get that breadth of information by reading." Even with travel and registration costs that go well into the thousands, the decision to attend the meetings is still "a no-brainer," he says. "After the last conference, I came back with 14 names of people who wanted significant follow-up. Can you imagine other ways of trying to get useful, productive interaction with 14 people?" He estimates it would cost him 10 times as much and take 10 times as long. He methodically debriefs himself after conferences by taking all the business cards and little pieces of paper with names he's collected and typing up a list of whom he spoke to, what they talked about, and what kinds of calls or information they agreed to trade.

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