Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas

289 Pages·2011·2.07 MB·English

by  Kevin P. Coyne

BRAINSTEERING

A BETTER APPROACH TO BREAKTHROUGH IDEAS

KEVIN P. COYNE AND SHAWN T. COYNE
This book is dedicated to those we love more than we can say, and who
believed in us long before there was reason to.
FOR KEVIN
My wonderful wife, Gergana
And my three beautiful daughters, Jenny, Tricia, and Krista
FOR SHAWN
My wife, Denice (ILYSMICSI!!)
And my angels, Molly and Maria
AND FOR BOTH OF US
Our parents, Ed and Kathleen
Contents

Cover
Title Page

Introduction: Why Brainsteering?

PART I: ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS (AND GOOD IDEAS WILL FOLLOW)

- The Proven Power of Questions to Help You Find
CHAPTER 1
Ideas

- Developing Your Arsenal of Right Questions
CHAPTER 2

- When It’s Time to Find a Better Idea
CHAPTER 3

PART II: TAKE YOUR PERSONAL IDEATION SKILLS TO THE MAX

- A Systematic Approach to Developing Questions
CHAPTER 4

- The Right (and Wrong) Uses of Analysis in Ideation
CHAPTER 5

- Optimizing Your Personal Ideation Performance
CHAPTER 6
PART III: LEAD OTHERS TO GREAT IDEAS

- From a Bad Brainstorming Session to a Great
CHAPTER 7
Brainsteering Workshop

- Teaching Others to Develop Better Ideas
CHAPTER 8

- Creating an Idea Factory
CHAPTER 9

PART IV: THE GRAND FINALE

- Developing Your Own Billion-Dollar Idea
CHAPTER 10

Appendix: 101 Right Questions to Spur Breakthrough Ideas
A Note on Sources
Index
Acknowledgments

About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction

Why Brainsteering?

D
on Frantz produces great shows. As a Broadway producer, he helped bring to
the stage such Tony Award–winning musicals as The Lion King and Beauty and
the Beast. As a producer of special events, he led the creation of such
multimedia extravaganzas as the long-running SpectroMagic parade at Walt
Disney World and the Dynamite Nights Stunt Spectacular at Universal Studios
Florida. Super Bowl halftime shows? Been there. World’s Fair exhibitions?
Done that.
But perhaps none of these shows represent Mr. Frantz’s most unique and
successful contribution to popular culture. You see, Don Frantz is also the father
of the corn maze.
That’s right, you heard us. The corn maze: that now classic down-home tourist
attraction that seems to appear every autumn in every community across
America. The one that consistently lures your neighbors and their loved ones to
spend a couple of hours trying to find their collective way through miles of
twisting trails carved into acres and acres of ten-foot-tall stalks of corn.
Now, don’t underestimate corn mazes. As an art form, they’ve been cut to
resemble everything from the Seattle skyline to a portrait of Albert Einstein. And
as a successful business idea—well, let’s do the math. Over 600 corn mazes now
appear each autumn across the landscape of the United States and Canada alone,
not to mention such exotic places as China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
Israel, Germany, and even—sacre bleu!—France.1 What’s more, they attract an
average of about 10,000 visitors apiece (and sometimes as many as 80,000).2
That translates to over 6 million visitors per year—which, for perspective, is
nearly twice as many as the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty, nearly three
times as many as Mount Rushmore, and four times as many as New Orleans’
famed Mardi Gras celebration.3 In fact, it’s about half the number of attendees as
all the shows on Broadway combined. And they can all be traced back to Mr.
Frantz.
So how did a Broadway producer get the idea for a corn maze? He asked
himself a question. One night in 1991, he read a four-sentence press summary
describing an upcoming festival of historic hedgerow mazes to be held at various
English castles, and he asked himself, “What would it take to create one of these
massive mazes in the United States?” The answer was far from obvious, because
hedgerow mazes take many years—and are exorbitantly expensive—to grow.
Fortunately, two days later, Mr. Frantz took a whole new perspective on his
question—literally. While flying cross-country on a business trip, he looked out
the window, and suddenly the answer was perfectly clear. Underneath those
spacious skies were mile after mile of cornfields, with row after row of tall green
stalks blowing gently in the wind.
In 1993, after he and a small army of helpers spent two years asking and
answering many more questions, Mr. Frantz opened the world’s first corn maze
on a farm in Annville, Pennsylvania. That three-acre maze, cut in the shape of an
enormous dinosaur and officially designated at the time by Guinness World
Records as the world’s largest, attracted 11,000 visitors in just three days, raised
$55,000 for farmers who had been victimized by floods earlier that year, and
launched what has become a worldwide phenomenon.4
We all need good ideas. Breakthrough ideas. All day, every day.
In the business world, the entrepreneur or CEO needs brilliant ideas for new
companies or divisions. The product manager or head of R&D needs innovative
ideas for new products and services. The manufacturing manager needs practical
ideas for new processes that will save time or labor and reduce costs, year after
year, to keep up with the competition.
In the not-for-profit arena, the professor or teacher needs fresh ideas for her
lesson plan. The student needs original ideas for his term paper. The government
employee needs politically acceptable ideas for programs that will better meet
the needs of her community.
And in our personal lives, we all need compelling ideas for this year’s church
fundraiser, or to make our twins’ birthday party memorable, or to create that
blockbuster movie script we’ve always dreamed of writing.
Some people need hundreds or thousands of ideas. That’s the case for the TV
producers behind those talking heads whose shows you surf past every night on
cable. Every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, they have
to come up with a steady stream of new and interesting story ideas that will rivet
your attention and enable them to charge big bucks to their advertisers. The same
dilemma faces radio talk show hosts, Web developers, advertising executives,
catalog publishers, and dozens of other types of idea workers.
So how do you come up with new and better ideas all day, every day? Or even
on demand? Is it really just a matter of being creative? Do some people simply
have it while others don’t?
No. We believe anyone can be creative. Better yet, based on fourteen years of
research and consulting projects involving individuals and organizations of all
shapes and sizes, we know anyone can be creative. Our experience shows that
creative insight doesn’t have to be a flash from beyond. In fact, there is a specific
approach, based on proven principles and easily understood practices, that can
dramatically raise your odds of consistently developing more and better ideas of
almost any kind. We call this approach “Brainsteering.”
Brainsteering found its beginnings in a large-scale research effort one of us led
while serving as a worldwide leader of the strategy practice at the world’s
leading consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. The principles and practices
discovered in that research effort were used successfully in over 200 McKinsey
client projects over the next few years. We have subsequently expanded upon
them and applied the Brainsteering approach for a wide range of for-profit and
not-for-profit clients in workshops with such diverse goals as inventing new
products and services, attracting more customers, designing more efficient
business processes, and reducing costs, to name just a few.
Brainsteering succeeds in virtually any setting by taking all the creative
energy normally associated with traditional brainstorming and steering it in a
more productive direction, better leveraging the way human beings actually
think and work in creative problem-solving situations. It will help you tackle any
kind of ideation challenge with an entirely different mindset and a whole new
level of energy and curiosity. It will help you look at things from an entirely
different perspective. Best of all, it will help you develop ideas you previously
could never have imagined.
What’s the secret to Brainsteering? As it turns out, there are two. First: if you ask
the right questions, answers and good ideas soon follow. And second: the right
process for consistently generating breakthrough ideas looks very different from
what you’ve probably been taught.
Obviously, many layers of subtleties lie beneath these two simple secrets—
and those layers are what this book is all about. But before we dive into those
layers, perhaps you’d like a little convincing about the power of our two core
principles.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Let’s look at the first secret of Brainsteering: If you ask the right questions,
answers and good ideas soon follow.
How powerful can a single Right Question be? Let’s visit the scene of a
lunchtime discussion that took place in 1981 at a restaurant in Houston, Texas.
Four years earlier, Apple Computer had legitimized the personal computer
industry by introducing the Apple II, the first mass-produced personal computer.
With a central processor and keyboard unit, disk drives, and a separate monitor
that was about the size of a small television set, the Apple II stood about two feet
tall. Transporting it required a suitcase-like box.
Then IBM followed with the IBM PC. It combined the disk drives and
processor into one unit, but separated the keyboard and kept an independent
monitor (also the size of a small TV). It stood about twenty-one inches tall and
was heavier than the Apple. IBM allowed other manufacturers to copy its
technical details, so a variety of tall, heavy machines nicknamed “PC clones”
flooded the market.
In 1981, three Texas Instruments executives—Rod Canion, Bill Murto, and
Jim Harris—met over lunch at a restaurant in Houston. Their discussion came to
center on a single question: “How could we design an IBM-compatible computer
that would fit into the overhead bin of an airplane?”5 By the end of that lunch,
the three execs had agreed on all the major design requirements—and the result
was Compaq Computer Corporation, which was founded in February 1982 and
grew to over a billion dollars in annual sales in less than four years—all on the
strength of that one product.6
Was Compaq just a lucky fluke? Not at all. It’s more typical than you might
think. In fact, there are at least forty-one other examples just like it. Here’s the
story.
One of the many key subprojects during our research effort at McKinsey was
to study the universe of companies that had achieved a truly extraordinary level
of success: start-up companies that had grown from scratch to achieve over a
billion dollars in annual revenues (measured in constant dollars as of the year
2000) in four years or less, without making a single major acquisition. We called
them “Z–1–4” companies, for “zero to $1 billion within 4 years.”
We found that as of 2006, there were twenty companies that had ever
accomplished the Z–1–4 feat in North America, Europe, or Australia. (There
may well have been others, too, but there were no comprehensive, reliable, and
readily comparable data sources for effectively analyzing companies in Asia,
Latin America, or Africa.) The list of megasuccessful companies included such
now household names as Amazon, Reebok, Google, and of course, Compaq.
In addition, we found another twenty-three companies that we categorized as
“near Z–1–4”—that is, companies that already had a modest level of annual
revenues (less than $50 million) before their period of explosive growth began,
or that took a little longer to reach annual revenues of nearly $1 billion
(specifically, companies that took up to six years to achieve at least $850 million
in annual revenues). This second group included equally famous names such as
eBay, Apple, Home Depot, and Priceline.com.
Clearly, these forty-three companies would have to be considered major
success stories. Although some faltered in later years for various reasons,
including corporate hubris, most enjoyed continued success. And in every case,
it’s impossible to deny the brilliance of their early performance.
Best of all, here’s the most dramatic commonality among them: forty-two of
the forty-three companies were based on a single concept. That’s right—with the
exception of one company that was based on three parallel ideas, each of the Z–
1–4 companies was based on a single shining idea that carried them to over a
billion dollars in annual sales. Needless to say, most of them have since
discovered additional ideas and grown even further—but think of the power of
each company’s first idea.
In many cases, the company’s breakthrough idea was literally the result of
answering a single specific question—the Right Question—at the outset. But
much more important, we discovered that in every case, there was at least one
Right Question that, had you asked it at the right time and place, could have
revealed the Billion-Dollar Idea to you.
While we don’t know exactly which questions the founders of all forty-two
single-concept Z–1–4 companies actually asked themselves, the chart below lists
several of the companies, their core idea, and a Right Question that, had you
asked it at the right time and place, could have led you to the same insight.