When it comes to ideas, more is better

One of my favorite quotations is from Nobel Prize winning physicist, Linus Pauling.

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas"

This raises the question: How do you have more ideas?

There's a whole section in your bookstore dedicated to this topic. Authors like Roger VonOech, Art Vangundy, Brian Mattimore, Doug Hall and others all have written great books with tactics and exercises to help you have a lot of ideas.

I've led brainstorming sessions for companies of all different sizes using some of these techniques and others that I've created. Speaking from experience, they work. But there are four things that are critical to creating a successful session.

1. Make sure you have a well defined objective and everyone in the session is briefed on the situation. You can't expect people to come into a room cold and solve a problem that's been vexing you or others for months.

2. Invite a diverse group of people. Try to include someone from every area that will be a part of the development and success of the idea. Engineering, manufacturing, finance, marketing, even your customers and end users.

3. Develop the ideas in three dimensions even at this early stage. Have people give the product or service a name, draw a picture, describe the key features and benefits and how it's different from what's out there now.

4. Suspend judgment. It's not that there are no bad ideas. There are. I've seen them. Anyone think a barbecue chicken flavored milkshake is a good idea? I didn't think so. It's just that if you say to someone, "that's a stupid idea" they'll stop contributing and you lose a potential source of ideas. On the flip side, if you say "wow, that's a great idea" everyone will think the problem is solved and stop working. There's plenty of time for judging the ideas later.

Brainstorming isn't the only way to generate a lot of ideas, but it can be a good one, especially if you need a team to help execute it. It gets people across the company invested in the idea early and can create champions that will help get it over the inevitable hurdles that you will encounter.