How To Brainstorm?

Taking time to upgrade yourself is the most important thing if you need to move ahead. You have to accept the fact that if you want to do bigger things, you need to give some time to plan. In between, you may get training on different things/aspects of business. You may also take out some time with yourself or with your colleagues so that you can think ahead. There are different things that you would want to look up to. We do think about the present problems, which is no doubt necessary. But it is firefighting. Much of the firefighting can be avoided if you are proactive. 

I remember my days with earlier Steel company, where it had planned to upgrade its capacity. They had called people from different teams. There were people from raw material side, maintenance side, process side, finish side, marketing side, etc. All these people were called and then divided into different groups which were a cross section of different sides. Now, the task of identification of plan were divided into two stages - One was the incremental thing. How one can take out more output from the existing capacity? These are often efficiency things or de-bottlenecking of some sections. Since people from cross-sections are in the team they do understand the problems faced by other sections. Nothing should be stopped from noting. After identifying the incremental thing, it was turn to think about the capacity addition. All the things were listed and then people were called upon to submit and read about their teams solutions. When all these things are collected together, the management can go through them and select the worthy ideas. 

For smaller firms, often there are no teams. In these conditions, it would be appropriate for us to take out some time off and then go to a different place than your office. It is better to have one big piece of paper - of the size A0 or A1. You can list different things on these. You can do mapping of production things, product things, HR things, marketing things and finance things. After you identify things, it will be time for action. Mostly, if you have identified the critical things, it is easy to put them into action.