Brainstorming is about generating ideas. That's what makes it wonderful and challenging at the same time. It's wonderful, because it has so few rules and lots of results and is challenging because it's hard to stay focused only on idea generation.

The rules of brainstorming must be followed. If the meeting veers off course and starts evaluating ideas, making decisions, or solving problems, then it can turn into a terrible waste of time and energy, not to mention damaging the reputation of future brainstorming meetings. There's a time and place to evaluate the outcomes of a brainstorming meeting. We'll discuss in later chapters how to pitch ideas, incorporate them into strategies, and finally turn them into projects. For now, we're going to talk about what could be considered a very scaled down version of a brainstorming meeting. In the next chapter, networking meetings are when we get together with another person to share and swap ideas. Since we all need to have a strong network...