$100 business progress and Intellectual Diversity in the creative process

I’ve made pretty good progress on my $100 business challenge.  After narrowing my 20 ideas to my top 5 I’ve decided to build and design simple websites.  My first customer is one of my older brothers who is just now starting Shoshone Nursery and Landscape Supply in my hometown of Pinehurst Idaho.  He also has a successful landscaping company so there might be an opportunity of building a website for him there too.  My next steps will be to have a meeting with him at my home office to sketch the design layout of the site.  There will also be a number of pictures that I can envision placing throughout the site.  One piece of the design that I’ve already put together is a built in map that shows where the nursery is, or where it will be once he is open for business. 

This coming week I plan on getting access to company logos and pictures of staff members.  They are in the process of putting in a garage on the property, so I think some progress of the building of the garage would be a nice touch too.  Come to think of it, I bet I could get him to buy me lunch and we could go over these details on my laptop.  There, game plan is set for next week!

I also wanted to include the following that I wrote about intellectual diversity.  I really loved reading and learning about this important principle this week.

Intellectual diversity is having members in a group who have different ways of thinking and different levels / areas of expertise.  An example could be that a wholesale toy company is wanting to expand its product line.  The team that would be assembled to propose new ideas could be made up of engineers, designers, sales professionals, and operations people.  If it was just engineers, then the new toy could be pretty functional and the sales team might not be able to sell it.  If it was just engineers and sales people the product might be pretty awesome, but it doesn’t have a very good profit margin.  There could be other problems that would include coming up with a packaging design that makes it easy for the operation people in the warehouse to store and ship the product. 

The ideal thing isn’t that we get a group of people who would agree on everything, but to get a group of people that will have different thoughts and insights.  Intellectual diversity will help in the creative process.  The group leader has to be very aware of the types of thinkers in his or her group and how to control the innovation or creativity process.  The different thinking styles will challenge the individual group members and encourage thinking outside of the box.  I’ve been in organizations before where the leadership only really wanted “yes men”.  When this is the case, it thwarts creativity and breeds an atmosphere of marginalization and fear from doing or saying anything that the boss or one’s peers would likely disagree with.