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."
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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."
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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.
Besides serving to make information more compact, Blohm emphasizes, conferences make it more visual. At a recent conference he saw three examples of how people are creating electronic books, which MathSoft has been working on, "and it became clear to us that we could be doing things better with multimedia." The value, he says, was the vividness of the hands-on experience. In fact, after seeing all the opportunities presented, he decided to hire a multimedia expert.
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Consort with Competitors
Casting at least sidelong glances at competitors -- to note what they're producing, how they're presenting themselves -- is standard operating procedure in business. But talking with competitors and trading strategic information is a little more unusual -- and if it's pulled off, it can be an enormous source of ideas.
Although Joan Cooper, cofounder of $16-million children's clothing catalog Biobottoms Inc., in Petaluma, Calif., says that competitors aren't her primary source of ideas about how to run her company or what products to offer -- she cites her management team, a regional group of other catalog owners, and the company's 50 investors as other sources -- she says competitors have been able to offer rare insight into what works and what doesn't in the industry.
Biobottoms has traded mailing lists with competitors from its start. At a recent trade convention Biobottoms even went so far as to host a cocktail party for its competitors. In the spirit of "you share a little, I'll give a little," conversation ranged from customer-acquisition strategies (How did your ad in the New York Times pull? Can ad campaigns pay for themselves?) to relationships with vendors (How's their quality? How'd you get them to hold backup product for you?).
"We've made a concerted effort to open the communication in our niche of the industry," says Cooper. "It's like anything: if you go out closemouthed, you'll get a similar reaction. If you go out with good feelings, you will attract people."
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Turn Customers into a Nonstop Focus Group
Perhaps the biggest source of ideas both broad and narrow is customers. Respondents to the Inc. FaxPoll named customers as the second-most-frequent idea source, after magazines. Some CEOs regularly take time to work the customer-service phones and hear what kinds of calls their companies are receiving; others visit top accounts and ask what they could do better and what their competitors are offering.
