What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 by Tina Seelig Read Free Book Online

normalcy. At the end of a brainstorming session you should be surprised by the range of ideas that were generated. In almost all cases, at least a few will serve as seeds for really great opportunities that are ripe for further exploration.
    It is important to remember that idea generation involves exploration of the landscape of possibilities. It doesn’t cost any money to generate wild ideas, and there is no need to commit to any of them. The goal is to break the rules by imagining a world where the laws of nature are different and all constraints are removed. Once this phase is complete, it is appropriate to move on to the “exploitation” phase, where you select some of the ideas to explore further. At that time you can view the ideas with a more critical eye.
     

    Rule breaking can happen throughout every organization and in all processes. A great example can be found at Cooliris, a young company that creates an immersive Web browsing experience. Essentially, Cooliris turns the standard flat Web pages we view online into a three-dimensional wall that makes browsing a faster and more intuitive experience. The images stretch out in front of you, making you feel as though you’re navigating through a gallery.
    Two Stanford students, Josh Schwarzapel and Austin Shoemaker, started Cooliris with a seasoned entrepreneur, Souyanja Bhumkar. They received a small amount of funding for their venture, but were having a very difficult time recruiting people to work at the company. This was a big problem. They were never going to reach their aggressive product development goals unless they brought in dozens of talented people. And to make that happen, they were going to have to do things differently.
    Josh, who was in charge of recruiting, started with all the traditional approaches to recruiting, including posting positions on job boards and craigslist, advertising on social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and even hiring professional recruiters. But nothing was working. So the team decided to look at the entire recruiting situation differently, and to break with these standard approaches. Instead of trying to convince young, talented people to join the company, they decided to focus on making Cooliris such an appealing place to work that students would be begging to join. They wanted it to be the coolest “party” in town. They hosted special events for students, made sure to have the most dramatic booth at the job fairs, complete with eye-popping demos of their product on big plasma screens; and handed out hip sunglasses to everyone who visited their booth.
    They also hired two Stanford students, Jonah Greenberg and Matt Wahl, as interns. Their job was to spread the word about Cooliris across the Stanford campus, and to identify the best students they could, independent of their age or field of study. Jonah and Matt are popular and well connected, and tapped into their social circles to spread the word about Cooliris. They helped make it cool to work at Cooliris, and eventually Cooliris became the place to be.
    Now that Cooliris was inundated with résumés, how did they decide which students to hire? Instead of going through a rigorous screening process, they decided to not decide, and hired almost everyone—as interns. This gave them the chance to see each individual in action, and for the students to get a taste of the company. Not only did Cooliris get an opportunity to take the interns for a test drive, but the interns got so excited about the products that they became evangelists both for the product and the company, bringing in their friends as interns and as customers. This helped with recruiting and built momentum for the business.
    Now that they were on a roll, Cooliris continued to break rules. They abolished the hierarchy between interns and full-time employees, giving interns significant projects with full accountability for their results. Each intern was given a project with a big goal and was