Where Great Ideas Come From

But before you can find yourself in the right locale to scout out ideas, you'll likely have to abandon assumptions about where ideas originate, what kind of culture fosters them, even what the best ones look like at birth. Not to mention ditching myths about the role of customers and employees--and even your own exalted status as idea czar.

MYTH 1
'Ideas will just come to me, as they always have'

Your employees would be unlikely to doubt you (openly, anyway) if you attributed the idea you cherish most to your fanatical devotion to feng shui, the newly faddish Chinese practice of arranging a room to maximize the flow of energy. But conceding that there's a mystical component to generating ideas doesn't mean you should assume that the process is out of your hands. The miniature Zen garden on your desk, for instance, won't provide any inspiration if you don't have time to rake it.

And the CEOs who generate ideas most consistently are mindful of doing whatever they need to--hiring, delegating, reorganizing--to give their minds time to roam. Yes, they make it look easy. But watch them in action and it becomes clear that they've made explicit trade-offs, with the aim of weaving idea generation into a daily discipline. It's not so much that they understand the process. But they do respect it.

On the surface, Cameron Kuhn comes perilously close to the stereotypical image of the eccentric entrepreneur. "You know that time right before you're about to fall asleep?" he asks earnestly. "If you stay up, that's when you get very creative." His rÉsumÉ alone attests to his idea overflow: not only is he the founder of EnviroCheck, a fast-growing $5-million provider of energy-conservation services for building owners in Orlando, Fla., but he has also started or taken over some 22 other small ventures. On the days he comes into the office, he often leaves around 4 and continues to brainstorm at home until he finally falls asleep--with a notebook by his side in case he thinks of something midslumber. Recently, he's even been dreaming up ways to encourage his 35-person office staff to act more professionally in the midst of hypergrowth at EnviroCheck, which ranked #268 on the 1997 Inc. 500. "A thought came to me last night," he says. "Everyone gets a $240 credit, and for every unprofessional act, an employee gives back $20. What do you think of that?" (Hey, we said he was eccentric.)

But even in his case, things aren't what they appear. Kuhn owes much of his ability to be creative to some very conscious decisions. For starters, three managers now share the job of running the company's operations. About six months ago Kuhn came up with another idea that helps him stay focused. He developed his own version of a "dash report," a weekly rundown of about six key marketing and finance ratios that tells him how EnviroCheck is faring. Kuhn is continually looking for new ways to manage his arrangement better.

While Kuhn's creativity is driven by the sheer love of starting companies, Ethan Assal believes that if he hadn't pursued hundreds of possible new ideas, his company very well "might have gone out of business." For the CEO and president of Executive Presentations Inc. (EPI), a $15-million integrated-marketing company based in Rockville, Md., living by his wits has become a necessity. Having started nine years ago as a slide-show producer, the company has found itself in one cutthroat industry after another--from systems integration to photo-lab services to Web design, adding hundreds of services in nine different niches. Not that all of Assal's initiatives have succeeded--there was a disastrous foray into 24-hour photo shops. But he attributes the company's fleet-footedness to the decision he made three years ago to bring in a chief operating officer.

Of course, not every entrepreneur relishes the idea of giving up operational control, but there's also the option of loosening up: you might force yourself to delegate whatever administrative tasks you can't complete in about 20 hours a week. So advises Gary Schroeder, CEO of Oakshire Mushroom Farm Inc., a $5-million grower based in Kennett Square, Pa. Schroeder has for the past two years cleared his calendar so that more than half his time is spent doing what he loves: nurturing new ideas while getting his hands dirty in the greenhouse, and calling impromptu brainstorming sessions.

Schroeder concedes that he broke the 20-hour rule recently to work on the financing of his next big idea. But he knew he'd made the emotional leap last year when he voluntarily vacated his office and moved into another building. "I was too involved," he admits.

MYTH 2
'There are no stupid ideas'

In recent years CEOs have been battered--by competition or, even worse, by management gurus--into making employees part of the idea-generating process by just about any means necessary. But whether you armed them with an Etch A Sketch or subjected them to rural retreats, the overall environment needed to be one of blanket acceptance: All ideas are worthy. None are stupid.

It all sounds very validating, but anyone who has mastered the process knows that the most powerful ideas share one other trait: they are resoundingly bad. Or at least that's how they look at first. To tell the truth, they should be no more than half-baked. "Ideas are the raw material for solutions, not the solution," says Arthur VanGundy, a professor of communication at the University of Oklahoma. Study the history of good ideas, he urges, and you'll find that the best of them tend to come from the worst "with high frequency." Silly Putty, for instance, started as a wartime substitute for rubber.

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