Take your crew out for a pizza one day and announce that you are going to
have an idea contest.

The concept here is to let the crew that sits and stares at the machinery
all day long put forward ideas to increase profitability.

Then offer to share some of the increased profits with those ideas that are
implemented and make the company more money.

I seem to recall that Henry Ford did this, and some of the best ideas came
from very surprising sources.


--

Roger Shoaf

About the time I had mastered getting the toothpaste back in the tube, then
they come up with this striped stuff.


"Tom Gardner" wrote in message
...
On one of my recent posts, you kind people pointed out that there are many
ways of doing something. Simple observations are often the most profound.
I'm not a master at being able to see a problem from different angles and
visualize different solutions. It seems that some parts of one idea
affect
another so the ideas are not independent, not "clean" and
compartmentalized.
I met with my guys today and discussed if we could figure out how to think
about different ways of doing things we are developing. I want multiple
solutions presented and thinking out of the box. It seems there is always
a
brute-force method of doing something yet the "other" idea, the one that
springs into existence at the odd hour, is often better, cheaper and more
elegant. How do you attract those "other" ideas?

Is there a method or exercises to develop creative thinking? Cutting
metal
and drilling holes is the easy part, how do you completely forget an idea
in
order to "see" a new idea? This may come easily for an intelligent person
but I struggle with my mental limitations.