Build a Successful Business: The Entrepreneurship Collection (10 Items)

Chapter 7

Consider Alternatives

Now that you’ve selected your team, it’s time to start brainstorming. Bring your experts and beneficiaries together to think about potential solutions. Briefly describe the pain, who’s feeling it, and its underlying cause—just to orient the group—and ask for suggestions on how to alleviate it. Lay out the ideas that stakeholders or beneficiaries proposed early on, and ask your team to generate several more. Encourage people to look beyond their own unit or function: How have other departments met this need? What have other companies done? What’s worked, and what hasn’t?

At the beginning of a meeting like this, don’t put constraints on people. Let them think out loud. Then, after the team generates options, you ...