Business Blog

Our Brainstorming Board

We’ve recently had a whiteboard installed in our office conference room.  The purpose of the whiteboard is to jot down all the great ideas that my colleagues have and collect them in one place.  In an effort to get folks into the practice of brainstorming, my colleague, Sherri, taped two paper cups to the board and asked people to generate ideas for the use of the cups.  Anyone could put up any idea, combine ideas, and put up as many ideas as they wanted.  The primary rule of the exercise was that any sort of evaluation of the ideas was not allowed.  It’s been a fun exercise, and from the looks of the board, my colleagues had fun and generated some good ideas in the process.  What I’ve learned from the exercise is the importance of focusing the brainstorming sessions.  Sherri was able to direct our attention on the two paper cups, so our ideas were all relevant to each other.  While you don’t want to stifle creativity, the focus on one concept (the cups) was nice in keeping the ideas mostly related to each other.  It’s been a good exercise, and I’m sure we’ll continue to get even better at generating ideas.

What suggestions do you have for brainstorming?  I’ve you have an idea that really works for you or your group, please feel free to leave a comment.

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Need time management advice? Do what BusinessWeek did and ask folks on Twitter.

BusinessWeek.com’s John Byrne, Patricia O’Connell and Shirley Brady asked their followers on Twitter for their best time management tips, and we’re re-tweeting the best of the bunch.

Twitter Time Management Tips: The Twitterati offer their favorite time management tips and tricks

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Gen Xers have weathered the dot-com bubble burst, and are now facing the current economic crisis.  MSNBC has a good article on the topic, as well as the video interview embedded below.

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If you’re researching telecommuting, here’s some information that may help you along your way. The first is a video showing how to find articles about telecommuting in the BNA Human Resources Library.

For additional information on the topic, you may want to look for articles in Business Source Complete, or look for electronic books in ebrary.  In addition to searching for “telecommuting” as a keyword, you might also search for “telework”.  And rather than searching about the pros and cons of telecommuting, try to thing in terms of advantages, morale, productivity, cost savings, accountability, technology limitations, performance, etc. There is also a fantastic article about “telework” in the International Encyclopedia of Business and Management.  WebWorkerDaily has a nice collection of blog posts about telecommuting.  Finally, you might want to look for the topic of telecommuting on sites like GreenBiz.com.

Other suggested terms for searching the topic include: virtual team, telework, virtual work, telecommuting, virtual office, flextime working, virtual organizations, virtual workplace, alternative workplaces, remote work.

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