Are there ways that companies can encourage their employees to think outside the box?
Pliniussen: You want to think outside the box but you also have to think inside the box. Thinking inside the box deals with making sure you really understand how the company works. Many of us in large organizations are unaware of how the box works. Thinking outside the box means you need a diverse source of ideas. One way you can improve the process for generating ideas is to set up groups of people from diverse parts of the company. If you’re trying to come up with a way to improve customer service, you’d want to talk to sales reps, but maybe you should also have people from finance, from accounting, from IT, because they would each see a different part of it, as opposed to just having the customer service team deal with their own challenges. If you want to take it from gold to platinum, then you also bring in people who are perhaps former customers, current customers, people who have nothing to do with your business at all. The more diversity you have in this input stage, the wider a
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