Brain Storming

I can think of no finer way to enrich a person's life than to stimulate him to a greater use of his creative talents. The ability to be creative, in which the techniques of "brain-storming" play such an important part, is largely a state of mind. It is a state of mind that we all can cultivate. As a business manager, I have been especially interested in stimulating ideas for two reasons: to benefit the business itself and to help the people who work in that business. In our organization we have had quite a bit of experience with this subject. And I can say that these techniques not only work on specific problems. They also help to broaden a person's outlook on life, to open his whole personality to the "idea concept" and to encourage a constant, fresh eagerness about all the problems of daily living. Although my comments are being made from a businessman's point of view, I think it is evident that they apply quite generally to all people. Any company or organization that makes and sells products in competition will prosper only as it develops new ideas. This is basic to growth and improvement. To fulfill this objective, the organization must have creative people on all its important areas, such as engineering, manufacturing, sales, and personnel. And it must have good management in seeing that the best results are obtained from those creative people in all those areas. Yet, whether one's business is large or small, there are some dilemmas in which the manager finds himself. For instance, a very small business, desiring to grow, may find the problem of developing new ideas a difficult and expensive one. Therefore, the need to avoid the failure of working on the wrong idea is vital. The manager of a large organization is also in a difficult spot. To him, spending money on a poor idea is not so serious because his resources are larger. However, because of this, there is less appreciation of the cost of development. Consequently the controls that he must employ can create an atmosphere that hampers idea men and their productiveness. Thus there are the dual problems of creativity and good management. Creative ability is most frequently the opposite of good judgment. Creative ability includes the tendency to experiment with novel ideas that might be unsound. It includes a good deal of the gambler's spirit where the individual "sticks his neck out" and tries something new, perhaps even "wild" or "crazy." Therefore, by its very nature, creative ability is on the opposite end of the scale from good judgment. In other words, if we were to draw a line to represent the various degrees of creative ability and sound judgment, we would put great creativity at one end and sound judgment at the other. The better manager, when rated along this line, would be much closer to the good judgment end than to the creativity end. So we immediately see that a "good manager" may automatically constitute a barrier to an atmosphere that fosters creativity. Consequently, this is a real challenge to business leaders: how to combine a flow of creative new ideas with sound evaluation. Business, just as art, needs a climate of open-mindedness, and should not be wary of non-conformists who continually pose ideas that run contrary to our orthodox thinking.