"Can we drink coffee today?" someone wisecracks.
A few minutes later two taxis are spotted parking by the front door.
The cry goes out: "They're here!"
8:31 A.M.
The clients' arrival, greeted by Trained Brains
Brassy Dixieland rhythms fill the mansion. Two veteran Trained Brains, Hannah Buchanan and Eric Schultz, pair off in a swing-your-partner, elbow-locking dance step. "Trained Brains"?
"The interesting thing about Trained Brains," Hall will explain later about the facilitators, "is they're not trained at all." Among the 100 or so freethinkers in his Rolodex: a food chemist; a math tutor; a cookbook author; Tom Wilson, the cartoonist who draws "Ziggy"; and a TV- and radio-commercial voice-over artist. Some are flown in for sessions. "They tend not to be agency creative directors or the classic creative people you might think of but, rather, entrepreneurial types, people who run their own businesses, people who can both dream and package their dreams into reality," says Hall. "They have the ability to provoke and stimulate."
Now the front door opens wide, and in troops the Celestial Seasonings crew: five employees, one former Celestial vice-president of marketing, and Mo Siegel, who holds a tall Starbucks coffee in a gotta-have-it grip. The group flew in from Boulder the night before. For them, it's 6:30 mountain time, and they're all a bit bleary-eyed.
Hellos. Handshakes. Hall and Siegel hug. Everybody grabs something to eat and drink. The band plays on.
Were it not for the rain, a red carpet would have been rolled out the length of the walkway to the door, festooned on both sides with balloons. Trained Brains would have stood by, filling the air with soap bubbles.
Had Siegel booked the Eureka! Mansion during the summer months, the welcome would have been even more spirited. In warmer weather, clients reach the Eureka! Mansion by pontoon boat, soaked to the skin after gleefully defending themselves with water cannons against a sneak-attacking mansion staff--Hall on a JetSki, others firing from a speedboat. That baptism by fun on Hall's 65-acre lake begins a kind of corporate detoxification he's found crucial to creation.
8:57 A.M.
Success defined and the evils of brain sucking
Hall's official welcome is given with everyone gathered in the living room, which is a cross between PeeWee's Playhouse and a frat-house basement. Two pinball machines flank an arcade road-rally game topped with an enormous stuffed Mickey Mouse. Hall's welcome always includes an around-the-room introduction, in which each person tells his or her name and also provides some personal revelation. Today's question: What's your all-time favorite toy? Past queries: What was your worst vacation? Any scars, and how did you get them? The aim: to lubricate people's tongues, ask them to talk about themselves. Then Hall gets down to business.
"Our goal is to come up with wicked-good ideas," Hall says to the assembled. "Big, hairy ideas that send fear into the marketplace. We need things that are really different, the sort of things that create conversation, as in 'Man, did you hear about that?' Ideas that are not new and different are commodities. The Harvard Business Review reports that you increase your chances of profitable success three to five times if you're extremely new and different." What Hall's doing is setting the bar, defining what will make the next two days a success. (That's important, Hall says. "I'm trying to get people to raise their sights, to dream of the huge-step change, not incremental ones.")
"But there's a challenge," Hall continues. "As we become intelligent, practical adults we lose the ability to see those new thoughts. As our education increases, our imagination decreases. The classic way of creating new ideas is the brain -draining, or brain-suck, method of creativity. You use your brain like a library. You just have to make a withdrawal. Instead, we're going to take your brain and use it like a high-speed computer. We're going to program it, feed it with stimuli. And out of that will come what we call the Eureka! Stimulus Response. If you're laughing, you're more likely to break all that education and come up with a wicked-good idea." Hall moves to the blanket-covered pile in the middle of the floor. "So we're going to show you what we mean when we say fun is fundamental."
Hall yanks the blanket off the stockpiled Nerf Ballzookas and passes out guns like a revolutionary. In seconds, the room's full of Rambos, blazing away at anybody and everybody.
Is this any way to come up with $100-million ideas? The pixielike Hall will tell you, Yes! and then maybe have you sit on a whoopee cushion. "I do that stuff for a simple reason," says Hall. "I get better ideas. Breakthroughs are going to contradict history. You have to break rules. And you have to give everyone overt permission to break rules."
9:32 A.M.
Tactic: The Mind Dumpster
The day's first task is introduced as a Mind Dumpster, or less delicately, a Metamucil of the Mind. Purple index cards are passed around, and on them everybody is to record a first flushing of ideas, in brain-sucking fashion, with no more stimulus than the theme from Gilligan's Island playing on the jukebox. One idea per card. The possibilities: New-product categories. Target audiences. Sensory experiences related to tea. Interesting words that come to mind. Anything. The point: pluck the low-hanging fruit, which is rarely the sweetest. Removing those first-blush ideas frees the mind for bigger, better, more daring concepts on harder-to-reach branches.
Hall stresses the day's creed: No idea is silly. "Today I ask you, as we work, to respect all the newborn ideas," he says. "Tonight and tomorrow we'll strangle the newborns. Strangling ideas is easy. What's hard, what takes courage, isn't finding the problems in an idea but figuring out a way to take the outrageous and push it even further."
