What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (4 page)

Running a successful brainstorming session actually takes a lot of skill and practice. The key is to set the ground rules at the beginning and to reinforce them. Tom Kelley, general manager of the design firm IDEO and David Kelley’s brother, wrote a book called
The Art of Innovation,
in which he describes the rules of brainstorming at their firm. One of the most important rules is to expand upon the ideas of others. With this approach, at the end of a good brainstorming session, multiple people feel that they created or contributed to the best ideas to come out of the session. And, since everyone in the room had a chance to participate and witnessed the emergence and evolution of all the ideas, there is usually shared support for the ideas that go forward toward implementation.

If you have participated in brainstorming sessions, you know that they don’t always work like that. It is hard to eliminate the natural tendency for each person to feel personal ownership for their ideas, and it can be tough to get participants to build on others’ suggestions. Patricia Ryan Madson, who wrote
Improv Wisdom,
designed a great warm-up exercise that brings to life these two ideas: there are no bad ideas
and
build on others’ ideas. You break a group into pairs. One person tries to plan a party and makes suggestions to the other person. The other person has to say no to every idea and must give a reason why it won’t work. For example, the first person might say, “Let’s plan a party for Saturday night,” and the second person would say, “No, I have to wash my hair.” This goes on for a few minutes, as the first person continues to get more and more frustrated trying to come up with any idea the second person will accept. Once this runs its course, the roles switch and the second person takes on the job of planning a party. The first person has to say yes to everything and must build on the idea. For example, “Let’s have a party on Saturday night.” The response might be, “Yes, and I’ll bring a cake.” This goes on for a while and the ideas can get wilder. In some cases the parties end up under water or on another planet, and involve all sorts of exotic food and entertainment. The energy in the room increases, spirits are high, and a huge number of ideas are generated.

This is the type of energy that should be present during a great brainstorming session. Of course, at some point you have to decide what is feasible, but that shouldn’t happen during the “idea generation” phase. Brainstorming is about breaking out of conventional approaches to solving a problem. You should feel free to flip ideas upside down, to turn them inside out, and to cut loose from the chains of normalcy. At the end of a brainstorming session you should be surprised by the range of ideas that were generated. In almost all cases, at least a few will serve as seeds for really great opportunities that are ripe for further exploration.

It is important to remember that idea generation involves exploration of the landscape of possibilities. It doesn’t cost any money to generate wild ideas, and there is no need to commit to any of them. The goal is to break the rules by imagining a world where the laws of nature are different and all constraints are removed. Once this phase is complete, it is appropriate to move on to the “exploitation” phase, where you select some of the ideas to explore further. At that time you can view the ideas with a more critical eye.

Rule breaking can happen throughout every organization and in all processes. A great example can be found at Cooliris, a young company that creates an immersive Web browsing experience. Essentially, Cooliris turns the standard flat Web pages we view online into a three-dimensional wall that makes browsing a faster and more intuitive experience. The images stretch out in front of you, making you feel as though you’re navigating through a gallery.

Two Stanford students, Josh Schwarzapel and Austin Shoemaker, started Cooliris with a seasoned entrepreneur, Souyanja Bhumkar. They received a small amount of funding for their venture, but were having a very difficult time recruiting people to work at the company. This was a big problem. They were never going to reach their aggressive product development goals unless they brought in dozens of talented people. And to make that happen, they were going to have to do things differently.

Josh, who was in charge of recruiting, started with all the traditional approaches to recruiting, including posting positions on job boards and craigslist, advertising on social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and even hiring professional recruiters. But nothing was working. So the team decided to look at the entire recruiting situation differently, and to break with these standard approaches. Instead of trying to convince young, talented people to join the company, they decided to focus on making Cooliris such an appealing place to work that students would be begging to join. They wanted it to be the coolest “party” in town. They hosted special events for students, made sure to have the most dramatic booth at the job fairs, complete with eye-popping demos of their product on big plasma screens; and handed out hip sunglasses to everyone who visited their booth.

They also hired two Stanford students, Jonah Greenberg and Matt Wahl, as interns. Their job was to spread the word about Cooliris across the Stanford campus, and to identify the best students they could, independent of their age or field of study. Jonah and Matt are popular and well connected, and tapped into their social circles to spread the word about Cooliris. They helped make it cool to work at Cooliris, and eventually Cooliris became
the
place to be.

Now that Cooliris was inundated with résumés, how did they decide which students to hire? Instead of going through a rigorous screening process, they decided to
not
decide, and hired almost everyone—as interns. This gave them the chance to see each individual in action, and for the students to get a taste of the company. Not only did Cooliris get an opportunity to take the interns for a test drive, but the interns got so excited about the products that they became evangelists both for the product and the company, bringing in their friends as interns and as customers. This helped with recruiting and built momentum for the business.

Now that they were on a roll, Cooliris continued to break rules. They abolished the hierarchy between interns and full-time employees, giving interns significant projects with full accountability for their results. Each intern was given a project with a big goal and was allowed to do whatever he or she felt would work to reach it. Of course, there was oversight, but the interns were clearly empowered to make key decisions. For example, the goal might be to increase the number of Web sites that are Cooliris enabled. The interns weren’t told what to do, but each was encouraged to run with his or her project. In this way, they could easily see what each person could accomplish and reward those who did an outstanding job.

But they didn’t stop there. They also figured out that the best way to identify those who were a good fit for the company is to see them in action. To do that, they brought in hundreds of students for user-testing of their product. This is, of course, standard practice to evaluate new project features. But Cooliris also used product testing as a recruiting tool. During the interaction with each tester, they could see how each person thought and how passionate he or she was about the product and, ultimately, whether he or she would be a good fit with the company. At the very least they got useful customer feedback and at best they found a new employee.

You might think it’s easier to challenge conventions and break rules as an individual or a small start-up firm, but you can also break the rules that get in the way from within a large company. I learned about the launch of Zune at Microsoft from a former student, Tricia Lee. This product, designed to compete with the Apple iPod, was on a tight development schedule. About halfway through the project, it was clear they weren’t going to meet their aggressive goals. The software wasn’t close to halfway complete, and on the current course—with the usual checks and balances, feedback loops, and bureaucracy—it was going to take much longer than expected to complete. To address this problem, one of the subgroups on the project isolated themselves from the rest of the team and worked intensely. They completed an essential piece of the software code, which got the project back on track, boosted moral, and allowed the product to be completed on time.

Companies such as Microsoft put processes in place that are scalable; that is, they have to work for large groups across a big organization. But sometimes scalable processes are not necessarily efficient. When there is a fire drill and things have to get done quickly, like with Tricia and the Zune team at Microsoft, companies need to break free of the bureaucracy. In fact, many companies decide to set up Skunk Works projects to do just this: they pull a team out of the normal workflow, giving them permission to break the rules, to free them to think and work differently.

Rules are often meant to be broken. This idea is captured in the oft-used phrase “Don’t ask for permission, but beg for forgiveness.” Most rules are in place as the lowest common denominator, making sure that those who don’t have a clue what to do stay within the boundaries. If you ask someone how to go about making a movie, starting a company, getting into graduate school, or running for political office, you will usually get a long recipe that involves getting incrementally more support from those who are already in these fields. It involves agents and seed funding and exams and approvals. The majority of people choose to follow those rules…and others don’t. It is important to keep in mind that there are often creative ways to work around the rules, to jump over the traditional hurdles, and to get to your goal by taking a side route. Just as most people wait in a never-ending line of traffic on the main route to the highway, others who are more adventurous try to find a side road to get to their destination more quickly. Of course, some rules are in place to protect our safety, to keep order, and to create a process that works for a large number of people. But it is worth questioning rules along the way. Sometimes side roads around the rules can get you to your goal even when the traditional paths appear blocked.

Linda Rottenberg, of Endeavor, shared a relevant story that had been passed on to her by one of her advisors, about two student fighter pilots who got together to share what they had learned from their respective instructors. The first pilot said, “I was given a thousand rules for flying my plane.” The second pilot said, “I was only given three rules.” The first pilot gloated, thinking he was given many more options, until his friend said, “My instructor told me the three things I should
never
do. All else is up to me.” This story captures the idea that it is better to know the few things that are really against the rules than to focus on the many things you think you should do. This is also a reminder of the big difference between rules and recommendations. Once you whittle away the recommendations, there are often many fewer rules than you imagined. This is how Linda leads Endeavor: each franchise is given three things they can’t do—the rest is completely up to them.

Another way to break the rules is to break free of expectations you have for yourself and that others have for you. Armen Berjikly, a computer scientist, always expected that he would spend his career working for a high technology company. He studied computer science as an undergraduate and management science as a graduate student. After completing school, he took a job as a product manager at a company called Echelon. Everything was going smoothly, he was well respected in the company, and his path was set. However, a close friend developed multiple sclerosis. He was so moved by her condition that he wanted to do whatever he could to help. In his free time after work and on weekends, he built a Web site called “This Is MS.” The site offered useful information about MS and its treatments, and provided a confidential forum for people with MS to share their experiences. The site quickly gained traction because visitors were hungry for the chance to tell their stories. Armen realized he had struck a nerve. He decided to build an even bigger Web site that allowed anyone to share his or her experiences anonymously. This new site, called “The Experience Project,” gained avid users quickly. Armen had to make a tough decision: Should he stay in the secure job with a reliable salary and a clear career path, or jump into the unknown by deciding to run The Experience Project full-time?

After serious consideration, Armen decided to break free from the expectations that both he and his family had for him in order to pursue this venture. It was a terribly hard choice, but it has been several years now and Armen doesn’t regret his decision for a minute. The business is hard work, but the most challenging part was deciding to completely reinvent himself.
⁵

So, let’s step out of the high technology business world and see how you can break rules in order to create something of great value in a completely different arena. The past few years have seen growing interest in restaurants that look at food, cooking, and dining in a brand-new way. Instead of using traditional cooking techniques, a handful of chefs are experimenting with “molecular gastronomy,” which involves stretching the limits of cooking in all sorts of unusual directions. These restaurants use equipment and materials straight out of a laboratory and play with your senses in wild ways. At Moto, in Chicago,
⁶
the kitchen is stocked with balloons, syringes, and dry ice, and the goal is to create food that is shocking yet tasty. They have a “tasting menu,” where you actually eat the menu, which might, for example, taste like an Italian panini sandwich. Moto strives to break the rules with each dish they serve, from “delivering” food that looks like packing peanuts to the table in FedEx boxes to making a dessert that looks like nachos but is really made up of chocolate, frozen shredded mango, and cheesecake. Each dish is designed to push the boundary of how you imagine food should look and taste as they “transmogrify” your food into surprising shapes and forms. One of their chefs, Ben Roche, says their goal is to create a circus for your senses. They question every assumption about food preparation and presentation, develop brand-new cooking techniques, and even design custom utensils that are used to consume the food. This is a great reminder that in any arena, from your kitchen to your career, you can break free of the constraints that might be comfortable but are often limiting.