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How Is This Book Organized?

And Who Is Doug Hall?

“Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning.”

– Ben Franklin

“Jump Start Your Brain” Is Presented in Three Acts

I’ll warn you up front: Jump Start Your Brain is not a scholarly work. It’s sewn together with lots of grins, a few smirks, and all the stuff I know about inventing new-to-the-world ideas. My aim is to educate a little, entertain a little. My personal hero and America’s first great inventor, Ben Franklin, had the same philosophy. In fact, some historical accounts suggest that the reason he wasn’t asked to write the Declaration of Independence was for fear he’d slip a joke into it.

• ACT I, BRAIN TRAINING: SETTING YOUR MENTAL FOCUS TO NEW-TO-THE-WORLD IDEAS.

• Act II, Jump Start Techniques: 30 ways to reinvent your life and career, each explained step by step.

• Act III, Go4It!: Even the most glorious, magical idea won’t do you much good if you can’t make it real. Act III contains inspirational adrenaline to help you turn your dreams into reality.

Disclaimers, Warnings, and Other Minutiae

If you are allergic to data, you’ll love this book. My apologies, data geeks. Though the book itself is based on hard data–from academic journals and original research–I’ve purposely kept technical discussions to a minimum. This book is designed to tell you in simple, action-oriented terms how to think smarter and more creatively about your life and career. Plain. Simple. Go.

If you like fun, you’ll love this book. This book is written to provoke a sense of playfulness of mind and spirit. If you’re a mature and proper RWA (Real World Adult), you might find the free-spirited nature of the writing, the use of BOLD FACE and lots of !!!!!!’s a bit annoying. But it’s how I talk. It’s who I am. The kindest thing said to me after my appearance on network television was that I was being myself. Besides, LIFE IS TO BE ENJOYED! There are too many BORING BOOKS ALREADY!

The Urgency for Thinking Smarter and More Creatively

In today’s world, victory goes to those who have the most meaningful offering. This means those with the best ideas win. To paraphrase Emerson—“Build a better mousetrap, and the World Wide Web will open your door to success.”

In the old days, you could build a business with a mediocre offering or with a lack of price competitiveness. In today’s instant-connection world, this strategy is far less successful. The World Wide Web has created a true free market economy where meaningful ideas are the currency for success.

The consequences of not developing meaningful ideas are extreme. If we don’t think smarter and more creatively, we’re all going to end up working for the folks in China and India.

My Name Is Doug Hall

I’ve been called many things….

• “America’s No. 1 New Product Idea Man” (Inc. Magazine)

• “America’s No. 1 Idea Guru” (A&E Top 10 and CIO Magazine)

• “Procter & Gamble Marketing Whiz” (Wall Street Journal)

• “An eccentric entrepreneur who just might have what we’ve all been looking for … the happy secret to success.” (Dateline NBC)

• “Counter-culture Entrepreneur” (New York Magazine)

• “Short, Balding Troll” (Comedy Central)

•“The Most Annoying Man in America” (Simon Cowell on The Tonight Show)

• Modern Day Ben Franklin (Joyce Wycoff)

• “Mr. Know-It-All” (ABC-TV’s American Inventor)

And my personal favorite …

• “Business Robin Hood” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

That’s the hype on me. The plain truth is, I’m a short balding guy with a taste for comfortable tropical shirts, comfortable jeans, and comfortable Birkenstock sandals. The difference is, I’m not afraid to think big, and I have sufficient supplies of energy and enthusiasm to turn my ideas into reality.

The Early Years—Real World Entrepreneur

I was born of a middle-class family in Portland, Maine, 253 years to the day after the birth of Ben Franklin, a circumstance that has tinted my outlook and influenced who I am.

At the age of 12, I started my first business performing as a magician and juggler and selling “learn to juggle kits”, magic tricks, and balloon animal kits. I called myself Merwyn the Magician, after my dad, who was not a magician and who deeply regrets the fact that his first name sounds a lot like Merlin.

In college I formed Campus Promotions International, a little company that marketed beer mugs, T-shirts, and just about anything you could print a logo on to four different campuses. I published a vinyl phone book cover, the kind with the ads all over them. Money was tight, so I took lots of items in trade. I got a diamond ring from a jeweler that way. It was the ring I gave to Debbie, my high school sweetheart, when I proposed.

Twenty-something—Corporate Rebel

The University of Maine spat me into the world in 1981 with a degree in chemical engineering and a hankering to get into marketing. I’d worked as a summer engineer at Procter & Gamble’s Mehoopany, Pennsylvania, paper plant in the pulp mill, where I learned that chemical engineering was not my life’s mission.

Instead of taking the classic path for a chemical engineer, I applied to P&G’s advertising department. At the interview, I performed a few magic tricks, figuring that any company that couldn’t appreciate a trick or two was not a place where I wanted to work. I got an offer and was hired on with Coast soap, a fine deodorant bar.

“Were there times I wanted to strangle Doug? Absolutely. He was what I call a ‘high-maintenance subordinate.’ You had to watch him like crazy. He’d be nodding at what I was saying, but his mind would be somewhere else. Linear, he’s not. His divergence paid off a number of times in the context of inventions that would not have been discovered simply by taking incremental steps forward from where we were.”

– Barb Thomas, my first boss at P&G

In time, I became the company’s first and only Master Marketing Inventor. The P&G Finance department calculated that my Invention Team could take a product to market with 10 percent of the staff, in 16 percent of the time and at 18 percent of the cost of a similar project in another part of the company. It wasn’t that we were any smarter. It was that we had a different mindset; an entrepreneurial perspective I now call the Eureka! Way.

It was a wild time. We wore comfortable clothes, worked 16 to 20 hours a day and loved it. The company loved it, too.

“Doug brings an extraordinary degree of creativity, entrepreneurial instinct and energy to his work. He has brought eight product concepts from invention to shipping, all within the past year … with a ninth project soon to follow. This has to be something of a record.”

– From my final personnel review at P&G

The corporation acknowledged and respected my efforts. But for all that, it’s still a corporation. And as with all corporations, certain rules of protocol are to be followed. The review continued:

“Doug has just one key opportunity for improvement: he needs to treat the ‘system’ with more respect… . (He) takes almost malicious pleasure in ‘beating the system’ by developing new product concepts faster and cheaper than if work were done through traditional channels … It does not help to rub people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation or their tortoise-like speed”

– More from my final personnel review at P&G

Guilty as charged.

One February morning, after about a decade at Procter, I awoke and realized it was time to get on with the next phase of my life’s journey. A lot of people wait until they’re 65 to retire from the corporation and start living the good life. I retired in my early 30s.

Thirty-something–Corporate Rebel For Hire

I borrowed Ben Franklin’s pen name for my new company—Franklin having published Poor Richard’s Almanac under the name, Richard Saunders. And that, in a nut, was the birth of Richard Saunders International.

Ben is my spiritual mentor. He’s the original American inventor, as well as the original American entrepreneur. We share the same birthday, January 17, a scant 253 years apart. We both have receding hairlines and irreverent senses of humor. We both have far-flung interests ranging from science to business to politics. Our profiles and physiques are strangely alike, although I think Franklin may have had one or two more chins. The Wall Street Journal noticed the similarities, too:

(Hall and Franklin) “sort of look alike, especially when the balding and bespectacled Mr. Hall wears colonial-style shirts with puffy sleeves.”

– The Wall Street Journal

The original vision was for Richard Saunders International to pursue a combination of corporate innovation consulting and independent inventing/licensing.

Inventing was fun and profitable; we sold or licensed a number of board games and consumer electronic products. However, the innovation consulting business quickly took off at a level I never would have expected, and thus the inventing business was put on hold.

Our work for Pepsi-Cola, the Eveready Battery Company, AT&T, and Walt Disney generated a big buzz in the media world. In quick succession, we made multiple national appearances on Dateline NBC and CNN and were featured in Inc. Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others.

Lou Dobbs on CNN reported research that showed the average American home has, on average, 18 products that we’ve had a hand in jumpstarting. In some cases, it’s been the invention of a new product or service. In other cases, it’s been the invention or reinvention of a client’s marketing methods. The number is not nearly as impressive as it sounds–when you realize that we work for clients like Walt Disney, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Kraft, Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola, and hundreds of others of the bestselling brands in the world.

As our work generated publicity, the name of our invention service, Eureka!, took over, and the name Richard Saunders International was assigned to the corporate holding company. With the construction of a custom-built creativity center just outside of Cincinnati we officially became known as the Eureka! Ranch. Franklin’s spirit lives on in a display in the lobby and in the Eureka! Ranch logo, with its flying kite and rising sun

The official name is Eureka with an exclamation point. Eureka! recognizes that magical moment of creation, when the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you suddenly see with clarity the solution to a seemingly impossible challenge.

In the original Greek, “eureka” translates to “I have found it!” Legend has it that the Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes coined the term after being stimulated in a hot tub.

Settling in for a long soak one day around 250 BC, Archie was preoccupied with finding a way to determine the proportion of gold to ordinary metal in King Hieron’s crown. Evidently, the king suspected he had been shorted by his royal crown supplier and was interested in ascertaining whether the crown on his head was mostly, if not all, gold or some cheap imitation. At the time, the weight of gold per unit volume was well known. But given the intricate nature of the crown’s design, with all its curlicues and whatnot, it was impossible to measure its volume.

So as Archie lowered himself into the tub, he noticed his bath water rise. The lower he sank, the higher the water rose, until it overflowed. The stimulus of the overflowing hot tub gave Archie an epiphany. He suddenly realized he could measure the volume of the crown by simply dunking it in a tub filled to the brim, then measuring the water that overflowed.

Archie leaped from his tub and ran naked into the street hollering “eureka!” Thus, in the grip of inspiration, he also invented streaking. And it didn’t end there–the hot tub revelation led him to the discovery of the law of specific gravity and the general science of hydrostatics.

Forty-something—From Idea Guru to Idea Factory Engineer

Eureka! success was tremendous. We had an industry-leading 88 percent repeat rate from some of the world’s most demanding clients. However, much of our success came from my personal ability to think bold thoughts. Or as Inc. Magazine described it: “Most of the winning creative leaps, most of the marketplace-driven reshaping of raw ideas, took place in the caffeine-stoked furnace of Hall’s own uniquely nimble mind, often at 2 or 3 a.m. during 72-hour sessions with clients. That’s when the real rubber hit the road.”

In the same article, writer John Grossmann described Eureka! as a professional practice not a reproducible business. “At the end of the day, Hall was no different from a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck or a wrench-twisting plumber. It all flowed through him. It worked because I ran around like the guy spinning plates on The Ed Sullivan Show,” I told Grossmann.

Near this time, I traveled to the North Pole by dog sled. It was a brutal 200-mile trip at 40 below zero. During the trip I came to the realization that my “legacy” to date included the creation of new types of tortilla chips, candies, caskets, credit cards, and cars. And while it made me laugh—it was not exactly what I had dreamed my impact on the world would be.

On the way to 90 North a new vision was born: a dream to translate what I’d learned into a reliable and reproducible business; to make the creative impact I delivered to my small, select group of corporate clients available to the masses of Real World entrepreneurs and corporations around the world.

When I returned to the world of the warm, every Eureka! session became a laboratory experiment. I became fanatical about measurement. We measured client teams’ states of mind before we worked with them. We measured them during the process of creating. We measured the end quality of all final ideas and their eventual impact on the world. We then did correlation and regression analysis to help us understand how to modify our actions to maximize client success.

The Eureka! method went through rapid transformations. As of this writing, we are at Eureka! 7.0—the seventh version in 21 years. Today’s approach reliably helps companies develop measurably smarter choices for growth. To be specific—Eureka! 7.0 develops some 12 times more “big ideas” than Eureka! 1.0.

Most important of all, it’s a reliable and reproducible system. This means that others can be trained to lead Eureka! Sessions with the same reliability as me. The chart below shows how even rookie facilitators generate results from each of the six cycles of a classic Eureka! Session that are nearly identical to those when I am in charge.

In effect, the system’s research over the past 10 years has removed the greatest barrier to growth—ME. I am fully replaceable. Instead of building an empire of thousands of staff members—I chose to follow the path of Ben Franklin for expansion. Franklin expanded his print shop throughout the colonies through dozens of partnerships with local partners. In exchange for Franklin licensing his expertise and assistance he received a royalty. So too, we are following that same path as we partner with other companies to bring Eureka! to thousands of companies around the world.

The turn from guru to idea factory engineer resulted in a No. 1 national business best selling book Jump Start Your Business Brain, an honorary doctorate from the University of Prince Edward Island, as well as television and radio opportunities.

David Wecker and I hosted Brain Brew, a radio program of ideas and advice for entrepreneurs, for three years. Public Radio International distributed the show nationally. You can listen to the show at http://www.brainbrewradio.com. In Canada, I hosted CBC-TV Venture specials, where I was dubbed the “Business Robin Hood” for my efforts to help small-business owners.

Fifty-something—Real World Entrepreneur and Educator

As I embark on my fifth decade, in addition to our continuing work with corporate leaders, I’m returning to my entrepreneurial and inventor roots.

It’s taken some time. Five years, in fact, of front-line testing and learning to help me regain my “feel” for the world of entrepreneurs (and detox myself from the corporate mindset). The result is a series of cost-efficient and effective programs called Eureka! Winning Ways.

We will soon have certified Eureka! Growth Coaches in all fifty U.S. states as well as dozens of countries around the world.

I recently had a wild ride as a judge on ABC-TV’s American Inventor produced by Simon Cowell. The experience opened my eyes to the plight of independent inventors. Invention promotion firms steal thousands of dollars from tens of thousands of inventors. One company took money from 1,950 inventors, and only 5 made back more than they paid in.

Over the next 10 years it’s my plan to create an HONEST and MEANINGFUL system for helping independent inventors clean, screen, and license their inventions to companies.

Lastly, it is my dream to create educational curriculum that can help students at universities, vocational schools and community colleges across the world “create and sell big ideas.” I believe that everyone, no matter what their profession, needs to understand how to create and sell their ideas for improving their company, community, or the planet. The greatest waste of resources in any community are the ideas thought of but not acted on.

Translating what we’ve learned from “big companies” to “small companies” was difficult. However, initial indications are that translating our learning to the world of education is even more difficult. Companies are generally easier to work with as they have the simple and focused mission of making more money by serving customers. Educational institutions are more challenging as they often have multiple, conflicting missions.

The Trained Brains

Through these pages, you’ll also meet my Trained Brains—the highest level of Eureka! Growth Coaches. They’re a collection of bold and brave thinkers who have demonstrated a reproducible ability to invent fresh and feasible ideas for helping clients grow their businesses.

Just as our system has changed, so too has the role of the Trained Brain.

In the old days Trained Brains were my support team. Today, I support them as they lead some 90 percent of all Eureka! Sessions.

Yesterday’s Trained Brains were entertaining performers. Style was more important than substance. Today’s Trained Brains are experts at discovering big ideas and developing those ideas into persuasive written concepts.

Yesterday’s Trained Brains were very imaginative. Today’s Trained Brains are also practical and more successful. Today’s Eureka! sessions result in ideas with a five times greater chance of marketplace success than those created by the average brainstorming session as practiced in most organizations.

While today’s Trained Brains are significantly more effective, they haven’t lost the spirit that is the heart of the Eureka! Way. Trained Brains laugh a lot. They’re young for their ages. They long ago stopped heeding the advice of their elders to straighten up and fly right. Their eyes are wide open with wonder.

Trained Brains don’t fit in, but they never feel left out. They avoid the beaten path and the well-worn rut as a point of pride. Somehow, they’ve been able to resist the corrosive forces of cynicism. They have a pure, simple way of seeing and an ability to extract the fresh from the mundane.

Most of all, Trained Brains have a gift for shaking it up, twisting it around, and inspiring companies to make something new happen.

While this book is cast in the first person, it’s an all-encompassing first person. It’s not just me. It’s the collective voice of the entire Eureka! Ranch team. The learning and wisdom of the full-time staff, the Trained Brains and the licensed Growth Coaches.

Friends have asked why I would give away my secrets …

My answer is, it’s the right thing to do. It’s an attitude I picked up while kicking around in juggling circles. The philosophy among jugglers is that if I can teach you a trick and you can teach me a trick in return, we’re both enriched.

Then, too, there are these sentiments from two authorities for which I have the greatest respect:

“He offered me a patent for the sole vending of them (Franklin stoves) for a term of years: but I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of the opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.”

– Ben Franklin

“When you share ideas, you have more.”

– Kristyn Hall, my daughter, age 5

At the same time, I also respect trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Success today requires a blend of open and protected materials. That means that, by virtue of having purchased this book as opposed to shoplifting it, you are hereby granted a license to use its content to invent ideas for yourself or your company. All I ask is that you use the proper trademarks and acknowledge their daddy at the bottom of your work sheets thusly:

© 1994-2008 Doug Hall

All Rights Reserved, Used with permission

(513) 271-9911

Eureka! Ranch, 3849 Edwards Road

Cincinnati, OH 45244

If you are an author, consultant, or trainer, remember, please, that it is neither nice nor right to steal, commercialize, plagiarize, or make money off this work without first asking permission. For permission call the Eureka! Ranch at (513) 271-9911 or e-mail me at DougHall@DougHall.com. Or else my wicked good lawyer, Patty Hogan, will call and have a chat with you.

NOTE: To date, I’ve never said no to anyone who has properly asked permission to use or reprint portions of my books, columns, or radio show segments.

FREE HELP: The Eureka! Ranch team offers a number of free services. Visit http://www.eurekaranch.com to learn how you can get free help with thinking smarter and more creatively about your challenge.

The Future Is Bright

The rising sun that is part of the Eureka! Ranch logo is a reference to Franklin’s speech on the final day of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, as delegates were signing the document. Pointing to the carving of a partial sun at the halfway point on the horizon decorating the back of convention president George Washington’s chair, Franklin said: “I have often … in the course of the session … looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

So, too, do I have the happiness of knowing that the future of creativity is great. The sun is rising on a renaissance age of invention. The Internet, the global community and new technologies have made it possible for everyone—no matter who they are or where they are—to discover, develop, and sell big ideas.