206 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
A good general technique for starting any project is a brain
dump. Here is the process. Collect the team members in a room
and equip them with markers and pads of 3-by-5-inch sticky notes.
One wall of the room should be covered with flipchart paper, unless
the wall is naturally friendly to stickies. Spend a few minutes on
introductions, if the team is new, and set the context for the brain-
storming activity. Decide on the topic to be brainstormed. The
wording makes a difference, of course. Each of the following might
be related to increasing the stock price of your company, but they
would be very different discussions:- How can the company increase sales?
- How can the company reduce expenses?
- How can the company grow faster?
- How can the company earn a higher price/earnings mul-
tiple?
When groups are first beginning a project, I suggest starting
with as wide a topic as possible, because the process itself will define
and structure future, more focused discussions. Start big and map
out the entire territory. In fact, this idea came to me after watching
a company called Learning Maps make a presentation at Disney
World. Learning Maps is in the business of creating visual repre-
sentations of a company’s position in the marketplace. They meet
with company executives and work with them, in a creative fash-
ion, to gain agreement about the nature of their business and how
it would look as a board game. What is their goal? Who are the
competitors? What industry conditions are changing? How does
regulation affect them? What are the future threats? What are the
key levers that determine sales growth?
Developing and producing Learning Maps for a company is
often time-consuming and expensive, but companies seem happy
with the results because management and employees have—per-
haps for the first time—a common vision. To understand the power14-25 ware 206 1/19/01, 1:16 PM