Orange County Register

Today’s tip is from Joel Zeff, owner of Joel Zeff Creative, and author of Make the Right Choice, www.maketherightchoicethebook.com. I’ll give you five and you can click here to read all t 10 of Zeff’s tips.

We all have brainstormed the same way for years. Everyone spends an hour in the conference room, bored and uninspired. Somebody throws out a recycled idea. Everyone rallies behind the idea because they really just want to leave the conference room.

Brainstorming should be fun, energetic and productive. Here are a few tips that hopefully will inspire the next great idea.

1. Choose a leader during the creative process. Someone has to keep everyone on track, or you will spend the entire session talking about television shows about attractive detectives solving crimes; attractive doctors saving lives; or attractive detectives and doctors solving crimes, saving lives and romancing each other.

2. Notate everything. Yes, it is a pain to write every idea down. If you don’t, you will forget. We always forget. Take notes, audiotape or videotape the session.

3. Change your location. You don’t always have to meet in the conference room for a brainstorming session. Creativity wants variety. Take a walk to another floor, go outside and sit on a bench or stand around the parking lot. Go to a nearby museum, store, mall, coffee shop or park to brainstorm. Use your surroundings to inspire and motivate you to create.

4. Create fast brainstorming sessions. Do not linger. Nobody looks forward to spending an hour in the conference room to brainstorm. Instead, use quick energy bursts. Everyone run into the room for 15 minutes and create as many ideas as possible. And then everyone must run out. Do this a couple times a day as a surprise. Use the energy to focus and produce ideas. Shorter idea sessions will create more ideas.

5. Relax, and create ideas each day. Take five minutes each day by yourself and think. Don’t think about anything in particular. Just think. Take a walk around your building. Go sit on a bench. Leave your cell phone and Blackberry on your desk. Now, just think. Each time you do this you will have an idea. Sometimes it will be a little idea. Sometimes it will be a big idea.

If you have a tip to help small businesses succeed, send it to me at jnorman@ocregister.com. If I use it, I’ll use your name, company and Web site. 

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