In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
Which was pretty much what happened. “We’re in our third month,” said one of the men, Clynton Taylor, “so we’re at about the halfway point.”
This was a project room at Jump Associates, a company with 50 employees that comes up with ideas to solve what it calls “highly ambiguous problems.” Exactly what problem was being solved in the room, and which client asked Jump to solve it, the company wouldn’t say. But Jumpsters, as its employees call themselves, are chattier about closed cases. Procter & Gamble asked Jump to study the future of water and what it portends for a company that makes water-dependent products like soap and laundry detergent. Mars, the candy maker, asked Jump to define the current meaning of “indulgence,” on the theory that it now conjures pampering rather than stuffing your face. General Electric has retained Jump for at least 10 different projects.
Jump’s work has elements of management consulting and a bit of design-firm draftsmanship, but its specialty is conceiving new businesses, and what it sells is really the art of innovation. The company is built on the premise that creative thinking is a kind of expertise. Like P.&G. and Mars, you can hire Jump to think on your behalf, for somewhere between $200,000 to $500,000 a month, depending on the complexity and ambiguity of the question you need answered. Or you can ask Jump to teach your corporation how to generate better ideas on its own; Jump imparts that expertise in one- and five-day how-to-brainstorm training sessions that can cost $200,000 for a one-day session for 25 employees.
This was a pretty exotic business model when Jump opened in 1998, but it isn’t today. In the last decade, a quirky legion of idea peddlers has quietly invented what might be a new discipline and is certainly an expanding niche. How and why this happened is, naturally, a subject that everyone in the field theorizes about. What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking.
A few idea entrepreneurs, like Jump, Ideo and Kotter International, are companies with offices and payrolls. But many are solo practitioners, brains for hire who lecture at corporations or consult with them regularly. Each has a catechism and a theory about why good ideas can be so hard to come by and what can be done to remedy the situation. Eric Haseltine, who has worked for both Disney and the National Security Agency, draws on the findings of evolutionary psychologists to explain to corporations why they are often unable to see opportunities that are right in front of them. “Although we like to believe we know what is going on in our brains, we know almost nothing about what is going on inside them,” he says. “We’re not only blind to certain things, but we’re blind to the fact that we’re blind to them.”
Though they offer different messages, idea entrepreneurs have plenty in common. Nearly all are superhigh energy. (“I’m octotasking,” said one, speaking on the phone.) Many are just eccentric enough to straddle the line between crank and visionary. (In his spare time, Haseltine is inventing a communication system designed to work in the event of an apocalyptic disaster.) Quite a few of them have published books with the word “innovation” in the title. All of them hate to be called consultants. “I like to position myself as a thought leader,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and co-author of “The Other Side of Innovation.” “A consultant solves problems,” Govindarajan says. “That is not my role. What I want is for companies to self-diagnose their problems and self-discover their own solutions through my thought leadership.”
You often hear this from idea entrepreneurs: Don’t ask us for the answers. Let us help you frame the questions, so you can answer them yourself.
When I visited Jump Associates in San Mateo in early November, it was conducting a one-day boot camp, attended by a couple of dozen executives from the region. The morning session started at 8:30 and was led by a handful of Jumpsters, most of whom were in their 30s. Dressed in identical T-shirts, they seemed plucked from the Apple Store. Some of them were M.B.A.’s and former management consultants, but nearly everyone’s résumé had a polymathic twist. One Jumpster was a former U.S. forest ranger and Korean foreign-ministry staff member. Another had an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a master’s in visual criticism.
The tone of the day was buoyant and rah-rah in a summer-camp kind of way; it began on a sunlit terrace, where everyone stood in a circle for a few yogalike warm-up exercises, to ease our way to cogitation. Our goal, we soon learned: to conceive business plans that would improve the experience of commercial air travel. (This was a pure, Platonic exercise in innovation, since none of the executives hailed from the airline industry.) For the next few hours, we were schooled in Jump 101, which amounted to a series of interactive lectures, interrupted by small-group sessions in other rooms.
David Segal is a business reporter for The New York Times.
