Day 2: Generate 100 New Ideas For Your Business

by Kelsey Ruger on April 04, 2010

Great minds ask great questions. They seek out questions that allow them to form new thoughts and ideas daily. Great questions cause us to reflect on past ideas, purpose and the mission we are on. As a business owner the ability to as open questions opens up new opportunities.

Unless you put your problems, ideas and thoughts down your attention is constantly shifting from one thing to another. Taking time to write down your ideas and ask yourself challenging questions will let you start to focus on what your should be solving.

Find a place where you won't be interrupted, and take 30-60 minutes to write a list of 100 statements and questions that you find interesting or impactful for your business. Don't just think about the list, actually write down things that you find meaningful to your business. Your questions can be "how do I increase sale?", "how can I better market my business", "what new opportunities am I missing?","how can I improve the new product?"

Volume is important in this exercise and it's likely that at some point the questions will come a little slower and be a little hard to come up with. It's important to keep going and get to 100 questions in a single session. Once you are done read through your list and note any themes, patterns, related questions and ideas that emerge. What do these patterns mean? Are they questions about you as a leader? Questions about the business? Your employees?

Put the questions aside for a couple of days to incubate. We'd love to hear what patterns emerged for you.