Effectiveness of Brainstorming Meetings

We all know the scenario: lots of people gather in a room to brainstorm a problem, resolving idea, discuss on schedule, or mission plan. Veterans approach with scepticism, newly employed think it will be interesting, and after an hour — or two or three — has passed, they all emerge drained, depressed, and demotivated. Why is this such a recurrent story?

Some academics try to understand what goes wrong in brainstorming. Sometimes there are too many ideas and we can’t keep them all in our heads. Then there’s the phenomenon psychologists call ‘social loafing,’ which we probably all recognize: the people who sit at the back of the room either does not contributing or reluctant to speak up at all. Only slightly less lazy is ‘social matching,’ which means that we are very likely to contribute lots of ideas so similar to each other as to be indistinguishable; it feels like we’re making a contribution, but the range and variety of suggestions remains small. Conformity plays a big part here; our desire to belong ( just to keep in line with what the boss says ! ! ) restricts the breadth of ideas we might think of but and do not wish to speak up and offer. Sometimes you speak up and the boss think otherwise, and your idea gets gunned down, though you really felt that yours is more appropriate solution.

Working from examples only makes things worse. All of our ‘new’ ideas cluster around that, and we fail to be as broad-ranging and wild in our creativity as we need to be. So if we are trying to improve on a procedure that has some flaws, we create more flaws than if we had started from scratch. Moreover, creativity declines with time. In experiments, students from a university were asked to come up with ideas for improving their school. After twenty minutes, their ideas were coded (for variety, novelty, quantity and range of categories), and what was striking was how fast the group ran out of steam: the first five minutes were the most productive !

Most intriguing of all was that brainstorming "alone" proved to be more effective than brainstorming collectively. In those first five minutes, participants who sat at a computer and generated ideas came up with 44 percent more ideas than those in a group. This challenges received wisdom that says groups of people will come up with a wider range of ideas than similar minded people or those working alone. But what it takes into account is that when we come together, like it or not,we all start to become a little homogenized. What this finding implies is that the way to get the creative value of diversity — and every company I know finds this a challenge — is to encourage people to develop ideas alone, and only then bring them together.

Ask CEOs or GMs what they spend most time doing and the answer is always the same: attending brainstorm meetings. Then ask how much time they devote to improving their meeting skills and you’ll get blank looks. We spend most of our time on an activity we were never trained for.

What happens in most brainstorm meetings? The most senior person — who usually called the brainstorm meeting — sits at the head of a table. Others drift in. If you’re lucky, you start only 5 or 10 minutes late. The issue, problem or question is identified, and then the brainstorming ritual begins. Just like some people at school always sat in the front row, some in meetings always speak first — and there will always be the laggards who wait to see how the wind is blowing. And then there are what we call the ‘social loafers’ — the individuals who always turn up and contribute nothing. For half an hour or more, a vast amount of second-guessing occurs, as everyone gropes for the answer that will receive the boss's or General Manager's blessing.

What is wrong with group brainstorming meetings? One of the mistakes leaders or bosses make most often is to underestimate the power of one’s own presence. This has nothing to do with charisma. If you’re the most senior person in the room, people will defer to you, and that usually means they’ll think less because when they say something differently, they are worried the boss disagrees to the contributions and everyone tends to swing with the wind and play along to get close to the boss's "preferred" idea or solution. 

That BIG promotion may land you in "deepwater" …………

You spend years, maybe decades, climbing the corporate ladder. Then one day, it happens. You have been promoted and appointed the “CEO”. At this moment, a lifetime of your dreams, slogging of hard work with many achievements finally come to fruition.

Being a skilled professional, you act calm and as everyone contacts you shower you with congratulatory note and sentiment your feelings overflow and this is the moment you’ve always been looking for. It is your lifetime crowning achievement.

And as the days go by and all the fervor calms down, you start to settle and fit into the role. It feels good it feels right and just like you’ve died and gone to corporate heaven.

Until, one day, it all falls apart. All too soon, you’re yanked off that lofty pedestal and falling further than you ever imagined an ego can fall. And you find yourself desperately wishing you’d never ever heard of those three letters : C - E - O.

May sound overly dramatic but not. And it’s not just about CEOs; it can happen with any big promotion. Just ask chief of BP. He is probably a good man and a good CEO who found himself in the “mother of all no win situations”. It is hard to find anyone in that position could have done better than him and the failure of the system depended on many factors and not him alone to have caused or started the saga. It can start from the drilling equipment supplier, the rig operation, the drilling crew mistakes, the electrical or electronic software controls that should have functioned during the emergency “well kill” when needed, and many other failures which could not be the drag by the CEO. We would love to see all the critics take a stab at it.

And now that BP is dumping its lightening-rod to save its brand and appease the American public, the media will have a field day with Tony’s reported $18 million exit package, 90 percent of which is his 28-year pension, mostly as a senior executive, which accounts for all the figures. He deserves every dollar and cents. And, he’ll be giving up a reported 500,000 share options and up to 2 million shares under a long-term incentive plan that today is worth about $13 million going up in smoke.

Should we feel sorry for CEOs?? They’re adults who are capable of living with their own decisions and actions. That’s how it is and how it should be. That could happen to any CEO who have been in the hot seat for either a while or long enough to get “hotter”. It can be a staff level job or even a promotion to AGM or GM. So, when you get that big promotion, some advice that can save a lot of pain, anguish or disappointment end of the day when failure come in front of your face:

Do not take yourself too seriously and set too high achievement for you may not be able to survive that fall. Self-importance isn’t real. On the contrary, it’s completely subjective, by definition. Never forget that you’re just a male or female, no more, no less and in any organization, you are part of the labour force contributing to the productivity or bottom line except that you sits higher level than others. You bleed and cry, just like everyone else. And what goes up, all too often, comes down in a hurry and you feel the pain much more as it falls from height. The higher the pedestal you set yourself up on, the bigger the fall.

Leading a company is tough and not easy, but it’s also risky business. Most fail either due to poor management foresight ( that is meaning due to your mistake probably ). A few don’t. Either way, there can be huge ups and down, and everything’s magnified if you choose to look at it that way. But that’s entirely up to you whether you want to take the TOP challenge and face with the consequence what may be. If you ask me, and I’m sure Tony would agree, you’ll likely be better off if you just keep your feet planted firmly on the ground and be contended with what you have achieved and take life at ease at some point in time and enjoy what you gain thus far….


BP’s timing seems a little bit of shrewd. The leaking well has been capped in July2010. Had the board brought in a new face too early, it might have attracted mud. Instead, Mr Dudley is well-placed to lead BP out of its hole. On July 27th the firm announced a record loss of $17 billion, the consequence of a one-off charge of $32 billion to clean up the oil spill, compensate its victims and settle fines. The firm will have to sell more than a tenth of its assets to cover this, but it will survive.

Mr Tony H will receive severance pay of a year’s salary (about £1m, or $1.6m) and the right to start drawing from a pension pot conservatively valued at £11m. (He may also become a non-executive director of BP-TNK, which is perhaps the closest BP could get to sending him to Siberia.) This “payment for failure” has prompted outrage: “£12m payoff for Captain Clueless,” fumed a typical headline. This is unfair. Mr Tony has worked at BP for 28 years, most of them successful. At least half of his pension pot was earned before he became chief executive. And the plunge in BP’s share price has wiped out the equity-related part of his pay package as CEO—a significant punishment.

Nonetheless, the story has intensified a necessary debate about how to avoid rewarding bad leadership. The financial crisis revealed that top bankers were fabulously remunerated for doing what turned out to be a lousy job. Some pocketed immense bonuses when they falsely appeared to be doing well, and then kept much of the loot when their firms collapsed. Other industries sometimes pay handsomely for failure, too (see table below ). It is not only business-bashing politicians who find this upsetting. “If I was running things,” growled Warren Buffett, an investor, in January, “if a bank had to go to the government for help, the CEO and his wife would forfeit all their net worth.”

Failed bosses in the west look seldom fired. Instead, they are usually allowed to resign or retire with dignity, and usually with the tons of money thrown at them. This culture of sympathy will be hard to break, not least since most board members are current or former bosses and may feel that “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

More importantly, ruining bad bosses is a bad idea. Who would want to take a job that came with a serious risk of financial destruction? Whoever did take it would surely manage in a way that minimised the risk of catastrophic failure. That sounds peachy until you remember that capitalism depends on risk-taking. Penalise failure too harshly and you risk creating bureaucrats.
Abolishing all golden parachutes would be foolish. Far better to design them intelligently. They should be generous enough to make a dud boss leave without a fuss or a lawsuit, but no more. BP’s parting gift to Mr Tony H looks about right. Had he been the boss of an American firm, he would surely have walked away with far more. Ken Lewis made Bank of America swallow the toxic Merrill Lynch but still pocketed $125m when he left last year. Bob Nardelli banked $210m in 2007 after a six-year value-destroying reign at Home Depot.

2010 year to spend or save for sake of economy ( Linda and Tommy )

The Straits Times in July 2010 published an article by Linda Lim, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, arguing that Asian economies should save less and spend more. The article spawned an e-mail exchange between Professor Tommy Koh, chairman of the Centre for International Law at NUS. Straits Times edited excerpts of their exchange and I read it with interest and found it with interest and educational below :

From Tommy:

DEAR Linda,

It is with some trepidation, as I am not an economist, that I write to register my disagreement with several points in your essay.

First, you state 'Cheap money fuelled 'financial innovations' such as sub-prime mortgages and risky assets, which led to a crisis'. I beg to disagree. It is greed that led Wall Street to deceive investors with those unsound instruments.

Second, you quote United States Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke as saying that a 'global savings glut' was the cause of these global macroeconomic imbalances.

Mr Bernanke's argument is self-serving and disingenuous. He is trying to blame America's creditors when the fundamental problem is America's unsustainable deficits.

Third, you argue that the reason why East Asians save so much is demographic. I do not agree. East Asians save because of our culture of thrift and out of prudence.

During the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, if Hong Kong had not had very substantial reserves, speculators would have succeeded in bringing down the Hong Kong dollar and stock exchange.

Fourth, I agree that East Asia should spend more - but not in the way that US consumers spend.

East Asia should spend more of its savings on education and training, housing and health care, on alleviating poverty and ensuring that every Asian has access to safe drinking water, basic sanitation and a decent standard of living, on improving our environment and upgrading our infrastructure and cities.

DEAR Tommy,

Thanks as always for your careful reading of my article.

On cheap money: Its contribution to the financial crisis is not at all controversial, though both former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Mr Bernanke have indeed said self-servingly 'It wasn't us' - the title of an Economist magazine commentary on the tendency of central banks to deny that monetary policy had any role in the financial crisis, a patently absurd suggestion.

Greed, we have always had with us. But when interest rates are low, first, it is hard to make money via conventional means so the greedy look for extraordinary innovations; and second, the cost of capital is cheap, encouraging people to risk it playing for higher stakes.

Cheap money always leads to asset bubbles, everywhere. There was also the lack of regulation which permitted excessive risk-taking. Greed may be necessary but it is not sufficient to explain a financial crisis of such magnitude.

On the 'global savings glut': Mr Bernanke came out with this notion well before the crisis. It was an attempt to explain why the US current account and fiscal deficits - which should have been unsustainable long ago - did not prove to be so. Even today, savers around the world plough their money into US assets, which perpetuates the deficits. Why do they do this?

Because the money has to go somewhere. There is so much of it and in times of uncertainty, there is still a 'safe haven' preference for the US dollar.

On the demographic explanation for savings rates: It is uncontroversial, with a great deal of empirical research behind it.

Culture may have a marginal effect but so far this has not shown up in the research. It turns out that East Asian cultures (diverse among themselves) have savings rates that vary over time and are strongly correlated with demographic profiles and real interest rates. The same is true of other countries.

Culture is neither necessary nor sufficient as an explanation for high savings. When the Japanese and Germans age further, they will not be able to avoid drawing down on their savings to survive. The same will be true for Singaporeans.

On what Asians should spend more on: The bedrock of a market economy is consumer sovereignty, so Asians should spend on what they want. For some, it will be more food, clothing, a home of their own. For others it will be better services - health, education, etc.

Chinese economists have been arguing for some years that China should be investing its surpluses in health and education services, and not in manufacturing for export to rich foreigners or buying pieces of paper like US Treasuries or BlackRock shares. Unfortunately, since so much of China's savings is in the hands of state entities, this does not happen.

DEAR Linda,

I hope you will not be offended if I were to give a rejoinder to your reply.

First, it is wrong to blame so-called cheap money for the excesses and sheer dishonesty of Wall Street. What happened was a combination of greed and a lack of regulation.

Under the regime of former president George W. Bush and Mr Greenspan, 'regulation' became a dirty word and 'de-regulation' a good word. But as Mr Greenspan has recently confessed, he had been wrong to assume the market could always be relied upon to regulate itself.

Second, it is very convenient for Americans to blame others for their problems. It is intellectually dishonest of Mr Bernanke - and, I regret to say, many of my intellectual friends in Washington - to blame Asia for our high savings rate and for lending our savings to America.

If American intellectuals were more willing to confront the truth, they would acknowledge that the fundamental problem is their low saving and high spending habits and their indebtedness.

This is not a new point. Many years ago, economist Henry Kaufman wrote a book warning that American families, companies, cities, states, and the federal government itself, were in danger of drowning in a sea of debt.

It is morally absurd for the world's No. 1 debtor nation to blame its self-inflicted problems on its creditors.

Third, we Asians save because it is in our culture to do so. Thrift and saving are among the Asian values which my grandmother taught me. Saving is a virtue. Spending and living beyond one's means is not a virtue but a vice.

I think it is time for Asians like me to stand up and speak the truth (with love) to Americans. They should save more and spend less. They should live within their means. And, if they do not, please do not try to make saving into a vice and spending a virtue.

Fourth, let me raise the issue of the exchange rate of the Chinese currency. The US campaign against China on this issue reminds me of another recent period in American history.

During the mid-1980s, when America was gripped by economic nationalism and protectionism, to appease the protectionists, Washington targeted Japan and the four newly industrialised economies (NIEs) of East Asia - South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Japan was pressured into signing the Plaza Accord which substantially revalued the yen by more than 50 per cent against the US dollar.

Washington also accused the four NIEs of currency manipulation as the justification to graduate us from trade preferences. The representatives of the other three NIEs in Washington kept silent, but I asked to debate the accusers at Peterson Institute.

What are the lessons learnt? The first lesson is that US trade policy is always driven by domestic politics. The second lesson is that though the yen was substantially revalued, Japan continued to enjoy (and still does) a trade surplus with the US.

It is not the exchange rate but the saving rate that is the root cause of America's current account deficit.

DEAR Tommy,

I don't disagree with you at all. But I think you are misunderstanding the thrust and context of my argument.

It was not about the causes of the financial crisis. These have been amply addressed by many, including myself and yourself. But the world has moved on, as it needs to, from the causes of the crisis to its policy solutions.

No one - including the Chinese government - disagrees that global macroeconomic rebalancing is required. Rebalancing is not the only solution to the crisis, but it is one solution - together with financial re-regulation, and international monetary policy and banking rules coordination.

The US must indeed save more and spend less; and China and other Asian countries must save less and spend more.

What I was doing in my article was actually challenging Washington pundits, who believe it's up to China and the rest of East Asia to change their macroeconomic behaviour. I tried to show them how difficult (and perhaps impossible) that change is: Asians will not grow old faster (and thus spend more) just because Washington wants them to; state-owned enterprises and export-oriented multinational corporations have no incentive to retain earnings and distribute them in the host country; and so on. In other words, there are structural and not just monetary-and-fiscal-policy reasons for these persistent global imbalances.

It is very Washington-centric to attribute the global macroeconomic re-balancing argument to Americans only. Many Chinese economists have said the same thing - and more.

I think we need to move beyond the notion that Americans have a monopoly of ideas. They do not - hence the increasing representation of Asian voices in debating such issues. Hope we can agree on that, even if you and I (both Asians) do not agree.

Finally, I think your comments are actually an expression of your frustration with your Washington friends rather than a disagreement with the theoretical and empirical reasoning underlying my article. Or at least I hope so, since I can't do anything to change the facts.

Work life crisis and the ups' and downs'

1. Got blasted out- The boss, the one whom you respected, dressed you down in one of project meeting and to make matters worse, he was not in the picture of the issue and wrongly point the finger at you. When he realized and found it a few days later, he apologized in front of the same group. That was the right thing for the boss to do and it taught us that humility is a good thing and important to upkeep oneself.

The recent issue in Leading Afghanistan: Lessons from a US Four-Star Resignation

From General McChrystal: the importance of accepting responsibility for our actions.

From President Obama: when a handpicked, high-profile, high-potential subordinate acts out of accordance with established rules of conduct, it's important to take the same actions we would with a more junior employee.

From these men, we can learn the value of humility. All modeled real humility in their responses — and that's a quality we can never see too much of in our leaders

2. Mediocre appraisal- When you received your yearly mediocre appraisal and inquired why, you were told that what you were working on wasn’t that impressive so nobody got excited when your name brought up. That’s when you have to learned to take chance and risk on high-visibility designated post and the major tasks you have assigned or task to. That will changed the entire trajectory of your future career and if you are NOT noticed at the top.

3. You are illiterate?  -- After reading your first ever attempt at writing a product specification or venture proposal, the manager-in-charge called you illiterate and asked how you ever graduated university. Sounds hurting and was he right? Nevermind whether right or wrong, as that’s when you learned the importance of writing be it in technical, service or in business field ? We all need to be able to write fluently and spell correctly and professionally. No "singlish" and better spell check before you press the "go" button if you are fond of writing long emails, trying to impress the readers. I find it amusing and shocking when a senior level manager has been expressing his email message with improper mixed of poor grammars, wrong choice of words, out-of-context and irrelevance subject content. End of the email, you got confuse and try to understand what is he trying say. Probably hear him out verbally will be easier.

4. Micromanager boss- You tried talking to him; that didn’t help. You tried talking to your management; that didn’t help. So you thought of leaving the company. You learned that the boss is always more important to the company than you are. It was also that important kick at the back that you needed to get out and try something new and hopefully for the better of your future.

5. Customer disaster-- You were relatively new to technical details when a manufacturing delay caused your biggest customer’s production line to be shut down. They weren’t pleased, to say the least. That’s when you realized this was the best opportunity to prove your value to the customer. You fought for them and did it with transparency. When your company delivered, you would have had a customer for life.

6. Getting laid off -- Yes, it might happened to anyone, you or me. Your first instinct might be to feel rejected and a pressing desire to lash out in anger. But all of us need to face such and fight it down and acted about as poised as we all could. It may turned out to be the right move and a blessing in disguise. That’s when you learned that everything happens for a reason and, when one door closes, another opens.

7. High-visibility crisis --  As head of a department for a company, you may experienced your first high-visibility product crisis - say a bug in one of your computer programme and that had already being used in tens of thousands of computers. That was the first of many experiences that would have taught you crisis management.

8. Abusive CEO--  Your boss and CEO ripped you apart a few times. But you were not alone and you may loved the company and your job, so you hung in there. Lo and behold, the board eventually fired him (him is the boss, for performance reasons, of course). For you, that proved an old Japanese proverb: “If you wait by the river long enough, you’ll see the body of your enemy float by.”

9. CEO called you out--- After a meeting where you blew a gasket, your CEO took you aside and explained that you had shot yourself in the foot and how it hurt your credibility. You were probably so impressed with his willingness to confront you that it got you thinking about your bullying ways and the merits of being straightforward with your own direct staff.

10. Branding disaster--- You have to put your neck on the line to deliver a complete rebranding of a company by a specific announcement date. But when one of the consultants let you down bigtime, you may have to dig in, 24×7, and make it happen. The lesson was stay on top of your vendors or competitors. Regardless of the relationship, they may not have the same skin in the game that you do.

In some ways, it might seem absurd to call Facebook a country and Mr Zuckerberg its President. It has no land to defend; no police to enforce law and order and compared with citizenship of a country, membership is easy to acquire and renounce. Nor do Facebook’s boss and his executives depend directly on the assent of an “electorate” that can unseat them. Technically, the only people they report to are the shareholders.  But many web-watchers do detect country-like features in Facebook. It is a device that allows people to get together and control their own destiny, much like a nation-state..

So if newspapers and tatty paperbacks can create new social and political units, for which people toil and die, perhaps the latest forms of communication can do likewise. To many, that forecast still smacks of cyber-fantasy. But the rise of Facebook at least gives pause for thought. If it were a physical nation, it would now be the third most populous on earth. Mr Zuckerberg is confident there will be a billion users in a few years. Facebook is unprecedented not only in its scale but also in its ability to blur boundaries between the real and virtual worlds. A few years ago, online communities evoked fantasy games played by small, geeky groups. But as technology made possible large virtual arenas like Second Life or World of Warcraft, an online game with millions of players, so the overlap between cyberspace and real human existence began to grow.

From the users’ viewpoint, Facebook can feel a bit like a liberal polity: a space in which people air opinions, rally support and right wrongs. What about the view from the top? Is Facebook a place that needs governing, just as a country does?

Facebook has certainly tried to guide the development of its online economy, almost in the way that governments seek to influence economic activity in the real world, through fiscal and monetary policy. Earlier this year the firm said it wanted applications running on its platform to accept its virtual currency, known as Facebook Credits. It argued that this was in the interests of Facebook users, who would no longer have to use different online currencies for different applications. But this infuriated some developers, who resent the fact that Facebook takes a 30% cut on every transaction involving credits.

Like any ruling elite that knows it relies on the consent from the ruled, Facebook seeks advice from its members on questions of governance. It allows users to vote on proposed changes to its terms of service, and it holds online forums to solicit views on future policies. And like any well-intentioned politico, Facebook makes blunders: its members were infuriated earlier this year by changes to its policy that made public some previously private information. If Mr Zuckerberg achieves his goal of creating the world’s favourite “social utility”, he may need to give users a more formal say—a bit like a constitution.

Experience shows that networks which neglect governance pay a price. Take MySpace, which was once much bigger than Facebook: its growth stalled a couple of years ago when its managers let the site become too disorderly. There is a thin line, it seems, between the freedom that spurs creativity and a free-for-all.

For now at least, real governments still have some aces; they can simply pull the plug on the service. Facebook is blocked in China. Perhaps Facebook is less a nation than a giant transnational movement—comparable to the Red Cross or the Catholic church—which has an overarching aim and can speak to governments on something like equal terms.

As Facebook’s masters present it, their mission is just to make the world more open and connected—and bring closer the “global village”. Facebook’s success raises a lot of issues, one of them is how much impact virtual economies and currencies will have on real world ones. The Chinese government has repeatedly curbed virtual currencies. Last year it banned their use to buy real-world goods and services, in part because of concerns about the impact on the yuan.

Would there be another social network site that could create a bigger impact on the virtual social network activity and able to swing the 500million users to leave away Facebook ? It would be something that needs to be very fresh with ideas and allow future users to behave in a different manner they wish to choose to show others on the virtual world.