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Jump Start Your Business

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."

9:45 A.M.
Tactic: The Mind Dumpster II

One or two songs past Gilligan and the Skipper, all the cards are turned in, and it's time for the second mind dump of the exercise, this time in small groups.

Hall and others have found that small rather than large groups tend to generate more ideas. Four or five people per group seems about right. "Any more than seven, and they're not as effective," say Arthur VanGundy, a creativity consultant and a professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma. Hall also suspects that the physical proximity of groups may play a role. Rather than isolating them in separate rooms, he generally prefers them nearly on top of one another, within earshot. Sometimes phrases or ideas will blow like seeds from one group to another.

Sitting catch-as-catch-can on couches, on the arms of chairs, and on the floor, the members of each group huddle around a formatted sheet of paper on a double-sized clipboard. Like everything at RSI, from the Eureka! Mansion itself to Hall's names for many of his idea-sparking exercises, these so-called Flapdoodle sheets are trademarked.

"You have only three or four songs," instructs Hall, once again employing the jukebox as a clock. The focus remains unfettered--it can encompass any stretch on tea or Celestial's brand equity. One group's scribe is Trained Brain David Wecker, a resident loose cannon and the coauthor, with Hall, of Jump Start Your Brain, the book that spells out the Eureka method, and the newly published The Maverick Mindset. (See Resources, below.) Wecker's got a stack of purple Mind Dumpster cards to goose the group should the outpouring of ideas be less than geyserlike. But that proves unnecessary. He's soon scribbling away with his marker, adding ideas helter-skelter on the page like so many mud balls thrown against a wall.

"Workout tea."

"Tea that keeps itself hot."

"Hotsy-totsy."

"Hotsy-potsy."

"A line of greeting cards."

"Bath products."

"Spa pampering."

"How about tea bags that fit over showerheads?"

"Teas that taste like foods you crave."

Imagine warming up on a doubles tennis court, batting balls back and forth with ever-increasing vigor. Or spin. At the Eureka! Mansion, you can hear the ball crossing over the net.

"Fiber tea."

"TNT."

"There's your super tea."

10:05 A.M.
Tactic: 'Bulging'

When the music stops, each group shares the ideas on its Flapdoodle sheet. A Trained Brain rewrites them on the facsimile-producing Panasonic whiteboard, also recording any so-called bulges. A bulge might be a related idea from another group that's worth mentioning now or, just as likely, any new notions sparked by a just-posted idea.

"We want to sell a tea bag with Colorado springwater," reports Hannah Buchanan. "And how about a portable steam mister, called Self Es-Steam. Herbal tea bags for a vaporizer..."

Group by group, the raw ideas pour out--several dozen of them--from just this first exercise, some with early swipes at product names: kids' drinks (Tea 4 Tots, Lip Ticklers), herbs for cooking, a college survival kit, breath-freshener tea, fortune-cookie-like messages on tea bags. ("What if they could be made to appear by adding hot water?" somebody says--a bulge.) Claps and cheers follow each presentation.