Clearly, Hall and his company endured pain. For one thing, the ongoing scientific analysis of the creativity sessions highlighted the need for Hall to question his own thinking. For instance, some of his employees wanted to try meditation in day one of the Eureka sessions, an idea Hall initially rejected. "The last thing I wanted was to have everybody close their eyes and commune with the spirits," says Hall. "But I set up a culture here that said, Experiment. I was hoping it [the meditation exercise] would fail, but it scored so well we had to find a place for it." In fact, he says, out of one meditation session emerged the concept for an award-winning new car. The real flash of insight: Doug isn't always right.
He admits, too, he got the idea-generation equation wrong in his first book and will be modifying it in a new book coming out this fall called Jump Start Your Business Brain. It turns out that fun isn't as big a deal as he originally thought. The exercises that clients liked best didn't correlate with the best results. Consequently, the Nerf guns rarely come out anymore. Fun plays a role in creativity, Hall believes now, but only to the extent it reduces one's fear to think new and wildly different thoughts. (Worry not: the Ranch still has an arcade's worth of pinball machines and video games.)
Predictably, Hall turned his North Pole dream into a sponsored fund-raiser. That way, he'd really have to go.
Most painful of all was the early experience of branching into the training business, offering off-site Trailblazer training sessions -- two-day, one-day, half-day, even one-hour lectures -- to teach clients the laws of the Capitalist Creativity system and the success-determining new-product characteristics Hall's crew dubbed Marketing Physics. Hall threw himself into the creation and testing of the training sessions in between hosting his traditional Eureka sessions for his corporate clients. So instead of decreasing his workload, he actually increased it for a time. "It was crazy," he says. "During much of 1998 I'd do a training presentation on Friday, another on Monday, and a Eureka session on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday." The burden was manageable only because he was beginning to step back a bit from the creativity-session work -- and because there was an end in sight. Once the format was perfected, others would run the training sessions.
Hall underestimated the challenge. By the fall of 1998, he figured he had a sound template. In fact, he'd already sold a Trailblazer training session, scheduled for December. Expecting rave reviews and backslapping verification, he invited two dozen training experts to stop by in November to become test subjects. Many gave Hall an F. Dissatisfaction peaked when he donned a judge's robe and wig and gave his verdict on the ideas created by the teams. One participant was blunt: "My best advice to you: license your name to somebody who really wants to do training, because you're not a teacher."
Hall hurriedly recast the training sessions, axed the judge persona, and happily watched as other training leaders scored better on client evaluations than he had. In the end Human Resource Executive magazine named the Trailblazer sessions among the 10 best training products of 2000. Hall had successfully handed over the reins. And he had the equivalent of a satellite reading on his progress in creating a business: he could start tracking "non-Doug revenues."
Just last fall, another such revenue source emerged. For one-third the price of the three-day inventing sessions, clients can now either come to the Ranch or have up to four Ranch staffers and Trained Brains travel to them for a two-day session called Eureka Coaching. "We're little Dougs in a way, ambassadors of the system," says longtime Trained Brain David Wecker. "Now we've got to convince people we can do this $50,000 thing with the same efficacy and efficiency that the $150,000 inventing sessions produce."
Hall is now much less involved in the three-day inventing sessions. He puts his share of that workload at 30% to 40%. Others estimate it's more like 40% to 50%. Either way, the percentage is down considerably from the old days. By operating more scientifically and efficiently, Hall is burning far less of the midnight oil. He's rarely up past 10 p.m. anymore. As the corporate makeover gathers steam, the number of big-ticket inventing sessions at the Ranch is also dropping. Last year the figure was 36, down from 45 at the company's peak.
Nowhere is the transformation from a practice to a business more evident than in the new brochure. Hall has gone from omnipresent in the old sales brochure to MIA in the new one. In fact, last year, when he was 42, he officially retired from the day-to-day operations of his company.
On New Year's Day 2001, Hall split his company in two: 10 full-timers in the client-services group and 4 (including Hall) in the research-and-development group. Hall now has the triple title of founder, CEO, and vice-president of research and development. His newest title has him most excited, for it points him in a direction that he hopes could address those nagging legacy questions. He's bowed out of Great Aspirations and is looking for a more direct way to leverage what he does best.
