The Idea Guru
Idea-generation guru Doug Hall is aiming to build a new venture that will bring the secrets of new-product creation to small companies everywhere.
Published May 2001
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEDoug Hall has been helping companies like Chrysler and Coca-Cola develop hot new products for years. Now he's reinventing himself -- with a new venture that will bring the secrets of new-product creation to small companies everywhere
By many measures, Doug Hall was the spitting image of the triumphant entrepreneur. There he was, in May 1997, if not bigger than life then at least eerily omnipresent on every airport newsstand he ran past. The cover of this very magazine trumpeted him as America's top new-product idea man. His "idea factory" near Cincinnati, then known as the Eureka Mansion, was booked practically every week with Fortune 500 clients paying as much as $150,000 for innovative, fun-filled three-day creativity sessions. Hall was also in demand on the conference and trade-show circuit, pulling down $10,000 to $20,000 for each hourlong speech. Money was piling up for this Yankee from Maine. One day Hall called Fidelity from the road and asked for the balance on his account. He jotted down the number, and like the T-bird aficionado who finally slips the key -- his key -- into the ignition of that long-coveted '57 two-door, he became stuck in the moment. Struck by the presence of not one but two commas in the figure he'd been given.
Had he reached entrepreneurial nirvana? Not exactly, as Hall soon would force himself to admit. In fact, Hall would even realize that he needed to dramatically make over his profitable business. Not because of changing market conditions. Or looming competition. Nor even to boost revenues. No, Hall would decide "to blow up the business," as he puts it, because he wasn't happy.
Of course, it took him a while to figure that out. He faced the music of his growing dissatisfaction like those who realize that their marriage is crumbling, which is to say bit by bit. Events tell them. Their hearts tell them. But they do nothing, at least nothing major. Not for a while. Megaton change is hard; the future too uncertain.
Hall had first heard a few bars of his wake-up tune earlier that year. One evening he'd stepped out of his limo at a swank Arizona resort, where the following morning he was to be the featured speaker at a trade-show gathering. On the golf-cart drive to Hall's private bungalow, the hotel bellhop casually asked, "How long you with us?"
Hall looked at his watch and did the math. "About 11 hours."
The hotel was a five-star place. The bellhop bit his lip and shook his head ever so slightly. "Too bad," he said.
Hall's room was gorgeous; the bathroom big enough to party in; the resort's facilities world-class. And he was going to go to bed, get up, entertain an audience for an hour, grab his check, and rush back to the airport. "Fool," the bellhop had probably been thinking when he shook his head.
"What the hell am I doing? This ain't a life," thought Hall, who sat alone in his room, chastened, considering the ironic turn his entrepreneurial arc had taken. Like many ostensibly successful company founders, Hall realized he wasn't running the business so much as it was running him. He'd grabbed the brass ring, but he couldn't get off the carousel.
And around the merry-go-round spun, cover story and all, until one day late in the spring of 1997, when Hall retreated to the 1,500-bottle wine cellar of the Eureka Mansion with venture capitalist Arthur Lipper III. Corks were pulled, glasses were filled and refilled, and at one point Lipper announced, "You know, Doug, I wouldn't give you any money for your business."
"What do you mean?" Hall responded.
"You don't have a business here," said Lipper.
"I've got a brand, I've got ... "
"You don't have a business," Lipper insisted. "You've got a practice."
Lightbulb in his mouth on the cover of his first book, Jump Start Your Brain, and Nerf guns blazing in Eureka sessions, Hall had indeed branded himself as a much-in-demand creativity guru, but Lipper was right. Hall had previously sensed that he was his company, of course, but Lipper's bluntness forced him to admit it. At the end of the day, Hall was no different from a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck or a wrench-twisting plumber. It all flowed through him.
"It worked because I ran around like the guy spinning plates on The Ed Sullivan Show," Hall says today. He had help, of course, scheduling and planning and executing his creativity sessions. But he knew, and his employees knew, that the real Eureka chamber was not the living room of the Mansion, brimming though it was with new product ideas, his on-call Trained Brains (freelance creative types schooled in Hall's idea-generation methods), and his dedicated core staff. Most of the winning creative leaps, most of the marketplace-driven reshaping of raw ideas, took place in the caffeine-stoked furnace of his own uniquely nimble mind, often at 2 or 3 a.m. during 72-hour sessions with clients. That's when the real rubber hit the road.
