PopCo by Scarlett Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

find the perfect man. It was all a bit yucky. Dan and I called them the Shagiators , which was funny at the time.
    There are several ways of becoming good at ideation. The first way is to be born with the gift. If you have been born with this gift, you are the type of person who will always be the one to say ‘What if …’ in any kind of situation. You will be the person who suggests the most outrageous idea to solve a problem, and you will find that, rather unpredictably, these sorts of ideas often work for you. You may believe you are lucky or even blessed with magical powers, but in fact you are just a natural ideator. The second way of becoming good at ideation is to spend a lot of time reading books written by creative or business gurus, or attending seminars and workshops either devoted to just ideation, or, more usually, to ideation and team-building. There are many books of this nature lying around the homes and offices of PopCo employees, recent hits including Unleashing the Ideavirus, Creating Ever-Cool, a Marketer’s Guide to a Kid’s Heart and Funky Business . Many industries use ideation techniques nowadays, often calling in a facilitator to help their employees bond, solve business problems or come up with a design for a new product. This is the realm of the flip-chart, the marker pen, lateral thinking puzzles and, of course, the Balloon Game.
    If you have never played the Balloon Game you have played it twelve times less than I have. The basic idea is that a group of people – your team – are in a hot-air balloon which has become unstable and will crash if some people are not thrown out of it. The Balloon Game thus involves a debate about who should stay and who should go. This enforced suicide/murder ritual is supposed to help your team ‘bond’. It is less disturbing if all the people inthe game take on the personae of celebrities or politicians or something, so that begging for your life exists at one remove, but the whole experience is still rather disturbing. It’s a particularly strange choice to use for team-building, as several people in the group will certainly have to (metaphorically) die in order that the team can prosper. I have heard of the Balloon Game being used in situations where companies are just about to lay people off. Apparently some companies deliberately use it to convince people that lay-offs are justified. Also – and this may actually be an urban legend – there was recently a fad in the City for Human Resources managers to watch through one-way mirrors and decide who to lay off as a result of the Balloon Game.
    This isn’t the most disturbing use of one-way mirrors I have ever heard of, though. PopCo was responsible for that. It involved six-year-old girls in a focus group testing a new cosmetics range for children. As far as I know, no one else apart from me was offended by the idea of various executives and marketers watching in extreme close-up while these little girls used the mirror to try out the lipsticks and eye shadows which, incidentally, never went on the market in this country but do pretty well in the US. Perhaps other people were offended but didn’t say anything. Let’s face it, I didn’t actually say anything. I wouldn’t have known what to say.
    Corporations in the toy, clothes, fast-food and music industries are known for applying the most cutting-edge techniques for having/obtaining ideas. Many corporations have things called ‘idea labs’ or ‘think-tanks’. McDonald’s has something near Chicago called the Core Innovation Centre where they experiment with different ways of arranging queues, serving food, cooking it and so on. People at Levi’s use a lot of trend-spotters and spend plenty of time in what they call ‘infodumps’, which are like brainstorming sessions. In these industries, if you can find a good idea and it works, it could well mean billion-dollar profits, happy shareholders, global brand-recognition and success. Because of