I had the greatest idea in the wee hours of the morning. It may have been the best idea I ever had. It could transform my business and my life.

I have no clue what the idea was.

Robert Epstein, contributing editor of Scientific American Mind, has identified four different skills that are essential for creative expression. The first and most important of these, according to Epstein, is capturing–”preserving ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.”

There are lots of ways to capture ideas as they occur to you: carry a small notepad and jot them down, make a voice note on a micro-recorder, use your phone to text yourself or leave a voice message.

It’s a bit harder to capture ideas within your company. You can ask everyone to use one or more of the methods listed above. But that will only work if you develop a culture that truly values new ideas. No one will make the effort to record their ideas if they don’t believe those ideas will be taken seriously.

In short, it’s counterproductive to capture ideas if you don’t plan to do something with them. That goes for your own ideas and it certainly goes for those of your staff.

Tim Sloane had an interesting post on realinnovation.com the other day called Ten tips for the Innovative Leader. Here’s one of them:

7. Collaborate
Many CEOs see collaboration as key to their success with innovation. They know they cannot do it all using internal resources, so they look outside for other organizations with which to partner.

Partnering may be great when you’re developing new products or services. But, as Gary Hamel points out in The Future of Management, the most valuable innovations have always been management innovations. Where would you look to find collaborative partners for management innovation?

The best answer may be to turn to your peers: other business owners and CEOs from non-competing businesses. They’re probably looking at ways to transform their companies, too. And when you put a group of successful business leaders together in the right setting, it’s amazing how many fresh ideas are generated.

Try it, and be ready to watch how your company grows.

I came across this slide presentation on Creativity Central the other day. Next time you have a problem and you get stuck looking for a solution, it might be helpful to take a quick look at these questions. You never know what might turn on the light.

I often say that fresh ideas drive great businesses. The other day someone asked me what I mean by ‘fresh ideas’. Here’s my answer.

Fresh ideas are good ideas you engage with at the right time.

Fresh ideas are, first, good ideas and good ideas are ideas that have the power to transform how you think about your business.

Fresh ideas are also timely. Whether the produce at the market is fresh or not depends upon time. If you’re looking for sweet corn and you get to the market just as a truck pulls in from the field, the corn will be fresh. If you show up two days later, it’s no longer fresh.

Like fresh produce, fresh ideas show up at the right time. And, just as with produce, whether an idea is fresh depends more on you than on the idea. We all come across new ideas every day. (Okay, few ideas are really new, but there are a lot of old ideas most of us have never come across). Ideas are fresh if you engage with them when the time is right for you.

Finally, you have to engage with ideas for them to matter. And if an idea doesn’t matter, it isn’t a fresh idea.

You’ve probably been at a seminar or training and come across an idea that really excites you. You think it’s just what you need to move your company forward. Then you get back to the office, you get busy, and you forget about it.

Why does this happen? Because you heard about the idea, you learned about the idea, but you didn’t engage with it. Engagement is an active process, not a passive one, and it is intense and difficult. After all, when an army engages the enemy no one is sitting in a meeting room watching power point slides.

No idea has the power to transform how you think about your business unless you really engage with it, wrestle with it, battle to make it your own. After all when you transform the way you think about your business, you’re really transforming yourself. And that’s never easy.

As often happens, a post on John Sviolka’s blog got me thinking:

As Gary Hamel eloquently stated in Leading the Revolution, most executives in an industry are “blind in the same way,” both to what is happening and to what they don’t see happening.

When leaders face new challenges or move to take advantage of new opportunities, It’s not uncommon for them to talk things over with other people in their industry. That’s what industry associations are for. And they often do a great job.

Industry groups are particularly good at solving common problems. If you’re having trouble with your supply chain, somebody in your industry may already have found a solution. If you’ve got a technical problem with your production process, you know where to go.

But for many important business issues, members of industry groups really are blind in the same way. Sometimes you need fresh ideas, a completely new perspective, an entirely different way of looking at things. You find that by talking to people outside your industry.

Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, a Harvard professor who studies creativity and innovation found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it,” often by applying specialized knowledge or instruments developed for another purpose. In other words, the more diverse a group of solvers is, the more likely a solution will be found.

Rely on your industry group when it’s appropriate. But for fresh ideas and new approaches–the fuel of business growth–you need to diverse group of peers from a wide range of industries.

Paul Sloan has an interesting post on RealInnovation.com called Ten Tips for the Innovative Leader. Here’s tip number 6:

Give Everyone Two Jobs

Innovative leaders must provide each person on their staffs with two key objectives: 1) ask them to run their current jobs in the most effective way possible and 2) at the same time find completely new ways to do the job. Leaders need to encourage their employees to ask themselves: “What is the essential purpose of my role? What is the outcome that I deliver that is of real value to my clients (internal and external)? Is there a better way to deliver that value or purpose?” The answer to the final question is always yes, but most people never ask the question.

If you want everyone in your company to contribute to growing the business, you must encourage each person to look for new ways to do his or her job and new ways to think about it. Since deep knowledge about the business is often tacit and distributed throughout the group, you’ll get fresh ideas you can’t find anywhere else.

But here’s the deal: don’t encourage people to come up with ways to improve the business if you don’t intend to take them seriously.

And don’t ask everyone else to do something you’re not willing to do yourself. You’ve got to think about completely new ways to do your job, too.

That’s two jobs for everyone, including you.

I’ve been watching my favorite 20-minute video from TED: Ken Robinson considering whether schools kill creativity. Here’s an excerpt (my transcription):

I don’t mean that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacity.

As Sir Ken says, we run our companies like this. We stigmatize and punish wrong answers. That’s harmful for at least two reasons.

1. As Robinson argues, stigmatizing wrong answers kills creativity. If people do not have permission to fail, they are unlikely to succeed at anything new. That’s bad for business.
2. There aren’t that many wrong answers, at least to interesting and important questions. In 1968, Spence Silver was asked to improve the adhesive used in tape. He came up with a new adhesive that bonded very weakly. This was definitely not the right solution to the problem he was given. Five years later, Silver met Art Frey from new products development. Together they used the wrong answer to create Post-it Notes.

Business runs on fresh ideas, big and small. They grow and prosper best when they adopt what Jim Haudan, CEO and founder of Root Learning, calls a Better Way mindset. That’s the attitude, shared by everyone in the organization, that there’s always a better way to do anything we do. If you want your people to think of a better way to get to market, a better way to serve customers, a better way to find or use capital, a better way to clean the bathrooms–a better way to do anything, small or large–you need fresh ideas. Stigmatizing wrong answers won’t get you there.

Almost half the schools in Minnesota are failing according to a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Even Edina Senior High, selected by Newsweek as one of the 100 best high schools in the country this year, is now, a few months later, a failing school. What’s happening here? How can one of the best schools in the country be failing? How can half the schools be failing in a state that Education Week ranks as 8th in the nation in K-12 achievement?

It’s all about benchmarking, and there are three ways to think about this.

1. There really are some serious achievement problems in American schools.

Education Week does rate Minnestoa #8 in acievement, but it gives it a grade of C. Only three states get a grade of B, and the US average is just a hair above a D. At Eden Prairie High, only 67% of the students are proficient in math. That’s not good.

As David Brooks pointed out in a story last week, the remarkable level of educational attainment which powered US economic dominance after WW II was surpassed by many other countries by about 1970, and US improvement has stagnated since 1975 while other countries have continued to improve.

There is good reason to believe that, in a global world, US education is no longer the world standard.

2. The evaluation system is flawed.

If Edina was a top-100 school four months ago, I suspect it still is. Calling it a failed school doesn’t change that. So what happened.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools are expected to show continuous improvement, but the standard of improvement is not strictly comparative. In other words, Edina is not asked to improve at the rate of other good schools, it’s expected to meet an arbitrary number selected in advance.

Creating arbitrary non-comparative scales is one flaw in the system. The second is that the reward (and penalty) system may tend to drag down high achievers. No Child Left Behind is intended to focus more attention (and resources) on under served and failing populations. That’s a good thing. But resources are limited, and directing more to failing students also means leaving fewer for those who are succeeding.

A good system should focus attention on improvements that need to be made while continuing to support success.

3. We may just be measuring the wrong things.

When we use benchmarks, it’s important to select data that really measures what we want to evaluate.

I suspect that what we really want from our schools is graduates who are thoughtful and curious, articulate and engaged, able to perform tasks necessary to fulfill roles as responsible citizens and productive workers, and capable of making significant use of their talents to improve their own lives and those of others.

The data we use to evaluate performance is standardized test scores. And some things are a lot easier to measure in this way than others: mathematical computational skills are a lot easy to measure, for example, than other kinds of quantitative skills. When you measure what’s easy to measure (or what you have always measured), you may be measuring the wrong thing.

I think all three of these are true: there are real problems with American education, the system we use to evaluate those problems may be seriously flawed, and we may be measuring things that have little to do with the real results we want. As a result, this annual scorecard just leaves me wondering. How are our schools really doing? I’m confused.

What’s true of No Child Left Behind is true of the benchmarking systems you use in your business. You certainly should try to identify where you need to improve and where you excel. But if you have flaws in your evaluation system and you measure the wrong things in the first place, you’ll just end up confused. Or worse.

I spoke with a CEO last week who has lost 37 customers over the last two years. He sells chemicals used in many metal processing plants. His customers went out of business when their customers started sourcing from Asia. Things may be looking up. According to an article in today’s New York Times, the cost of oil my result in a significant re-thinking of globalization.

It now costs almost almost three times as much to ship a container from China to the US than it did ten years ago, so large ships are slowing down by 20% to save fuel. Further, the capacity of US ports, especially on the west coast, is not growing nearly fast enough to handle all of the traffic resulting from outsourcing to Asia. That means additional increases in cost and slower and less reliable deliveries.

As a result, it makes sense for many industries to put factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers. That means that some businesses that have cut back significantly may start to grow. It means that capacity lost when businesses closed may need to be rebuilt. It may mean that established companies may need to relocate to to be closer to their customers.

This won’t happen tomorrow, but you can expect to see changes over the next several years. My guy is thinking about all this. He’s ready to take advantage of changing circumstances. Are you?