Jump Start Your Brain

A successful marketing manager and product inventor challenges conventional ways of thinking and reveals how to successfully market new ideas

The techniques for jump-starting your brain are wacky as presented here by freelancer Wecker and Hall, founder of the Richard Saunders International Eureka! Mansion in Cincinnati, Ohio, home of the Eureka! Stimulus Response learning system, which taps into your B.O.S., or Brain Operating System. (If you're wondering why a guy named Hall would call his school Richard Saunders?it was Benjamin Franklin's pen name). Frequently quoting Franklin and Hall's five-year-old daughter Kristyn, the authors set about turning readers into Trained Brains. They suggest you become adventurous ("Have dinner at the fourteenth restaurant listed in the yellow pages"), believe in magic, analyze yourself (do you see yourself as sophisticated? boring?) and relax your dressing style ("Wearing a tie to a Eureka! Stimulus Response effort is a hanging offense"). Readers are likely to find the toys in this playpen too distracting to move on to problem solving. Fortune Book Club, Executive Program, BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sandwiched in between a ton of exclamation marks, big type, and silly clip art is Hall's rather elemental idea: to be creative, you need to stimulate your brain with external "things," ranging from dime-store toys to Sears & Roebuck-like catalogues. Included are a psychological rationale for his approach to creativity and 36 brain programs, the actual techniques used to undrain the brain. By using disguised case histories and national publicity as evidence, he and his coauthor sell us on the right way to train brains. Corporate types might prefer a tamer version, but his substance and his premise (that U.S. businesses are decidedly noninnovative) are on target. Barbara Jacobs