Some follow lunch with a stroll through the backyard's English-style formal garden, where creative sessions are sometimes held in the summer months. A few step up to the pinball machines. After about an hour, everyone drifts back to the living room.
1:14 P.M.
More exercises
Hall silences the living-room din with a whistle. It's back to the business of inventing--there are four more group exercises before half the Celestial folks need to head out to catch their plane back to Colorado.
"It takes four or five hours just to open up their minds," Hall stresses, going on to tell about one client who requested--and did not get--a change in the mansion MO. "They wanted to brainstorm for 35 minutes and then spend the rest of the time developing the ideas. Thirty-five minutes," says Hall, spitting out the words like spoiled milk. "You're talking $100-million products. Can't you spend at least eight hours on the open-ended stuff? We really push people here. What often happens is, late in the day when they think they've thought of everything they can, all of a sudden out pops another idea."
The afternoon speeds along with exercises now targeted toward specific areas, like ginseng or an intriguing "spa in a box" concept--products that would consist of a particular tea packaged with related items that extend or amplify the tea-drinking experience. What would the concept be called? What, besides tea bags, might go into the boxes? Each group gets a boom box, an audiotape of soothing nature sounds, a basket from the stimulus library brimming with sample "rest and relaxation" products, and a couple of different boxes of Celestial Seasonings teas.
A session on dessert products coincides with afternoon tea (guess whose?) and mounds of scones and chocolate-dipped strawberries. The ideas keep coming.
The late-afternoon arrival of the airport-bound taxi prompts Hall to reach for parting gifts. He passes out Eureka! Mansion T-shirts, bags of RSI's Brain Brew coffee, and copies of his books to the four departing Celestial employees. "We'll break till 6 o'clock," Hall announces to the remaining attendees.
5:10 P.M.
Time-out
Hall, his staff, and the Trained Brains descend the steep stairway to his candlelit wine cellar. Hall pours a California champagne into paper cups and toasts the day's efforts. "We've got gobs of stuff. Some of it's in scrambled pieces, but we're in good shape. They want to start earlier tomorrow morning, though, so they can catch an earlier flight. We can do that, but it's going to be a long night," he announces to the core group who will stay on after dinner, adding, "Sleep is for wimps."
6:00 P.M.
Dinner
Dinner is fortifying comfort food--meat loaf and mashed potatoes--that almost everybody carries back to the living room, where the conversations, inevitably, keep circling back to the bigger ideas that bubbled up earlier in the day.
"I really like the idea of that," says Siegel, restating his affection for the artist's package design.
"A breakthrough there," says Hall, "and the company triples in size."
7:14 P.M.
Tactic: Categorize ideas, write product concepts
The night's work is task oriented. David Wecker's at a computer in the mansion's library. His first assignment: conceptualizing a new line of Celestial Teas, a faux-British offering called Royaltea. One room back, Eric Schultz is positioning an entirely new beverage for Celestial. Upstairs, in her office, with New Age music playing in the background, Sandie Glass works to corral and expand upon the far-ranging ideas generated for those themed kits. Everybody else is in the living room, taking turns punching up jukebox favorites while working to bring a bit of order to the morning's intentionally chaotic upwelling of ideas. That group includes Trained Brain Jeff Stamp; Mo Siegel; Lindsay Moore, Celestial's senior director of innovation and creativity; Keith Brenner, a consultant specializing in strategic planning and formerly Celestial's vice-president of marketing; and mansion apprentice Sean McCosh.
While McCosh sifts through the stack of purple Mind Dumpster cards, pulling out any remotely viable notions that went unmentioned during the day's sessions, the others begin separating the wheat from the chaff on the more than two dozen Flapdoodle sheets. Hall's instruction: write any promising near-term idea on a red index card; longer-term notions or those requiring licensing go on yellow cards. Hall then ducks out to visit a student art show at his daughter's school.
9:00 P.M.
More sifting
Hall returns an hour and a half later, dressed even more comfortably than before in red shorts, an oversize yellow T-shirt, and a blue University of Maine hockey cap worn backwards. Again, he's got bare feet. Arranged on the living-room rug are seven rows of index cards, each row 8 to 10 cards deep: the cards represent about five dozen ideas with varying degrees of marketplace potential, generated in less than 12 hours. The Eureka! Mansion has worked its preliminary magic--something it's becoming well known for. A couple of years ago, the University of Oklahoma's Arthur VanGundy compared various idea-sparking strategies with Hall's Eureka! Stimulus Response methods. VanGundy asked his groups and Hall's to come up with different ideas for snack foods. Hall's groups outperformed all the others, generating not only more ideas for new products but also far more meaningful ideas (as judged by a panel of food-industry experts). Most striking was the gap between traditional, unstimulated, brain-draining groups of four, which generated an average of 6.5 marketworthy ideas in 45 minutes, versus Hall's Eureka! groups, which averaged 36.3 meaningful ideas, or 558% more. "I was totally amazed," says VanGundy, who's been known to hire some of Hall's Trained Brains for his own creativity sessions. "I'd hold Doug up as a model of the principles I've been talking about for years."
