DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the question based on it. You won’t…

DIRECTIONS: Read the passage and answer the question based on it.

You won’t get the great ideas you need from the vice president of strategy or the head of a new product development. They’ve got hurdle rates to consider, budgetary constraints to navigate, and lots of competing claims on their time, attention, and political support. And you definitely can’t wait for great Ideas to come from the CEO. He or she may be at the top of the heap, but that doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to generating the best thinking. By the time most CEOs actually make it to the top, they’re running on intellectual fumes, having already spent their creativity in the jobs they had that propelled them to the top. It’s been a long time since they read, saw, thought, or experienced anything fresh, new, or creative.

So where do great ideas come from? From new hires, fresh green recruits to your team. Why? Because they have fresh eyes. The truth is all of us have a tendency to become inured to the daily operations of the workplace. Small inconsistencies or inadequacies gradually become acceptable; opportunities for improvement or innovation go by the boards because we simply don’t see them anymore. But new hires see them. They ask simple but necessary questions: Why do we do it like that? Couldn’t we do it better?

It used to be the case in most organisations that if you got transferred to a part of the company out in the boondocks your career was in trouble. These days’ chances are good you will finally have a chance to participate in some meaningful innovation. The reason is simple: In many companies, headquarters is the bastion of the status quo; the closer you get to the throne, the less of a chance you have to try new things. But out on the periphery, experimentation can take place. This is where new ideas are born, tested, tried, and refined. If they work they can always be repatriated to headquarters. If they fail, they can be given a quite, dignified burial, and no one ever hears about those ideas again.

The best ideas often come from the people with the dirtiest fingernails. They are the tech reps at Xerox who actually repair the machines, and can offer the product development people a bundle of ways to make their product better and more reliable. They’re the call service reps who actually talk – and even more important, listen – to customers. Almost every company will tell you that the voice of the customer needs to be heeded and the call service folks are the one who have it ringing in their ears all day long.

The hard truth is, there aren’t any new ideas. There are only new applications and smart twists on old ones. So if you want to be in the great – idea business, one way to increase your flow of ideas is to steal them. The history of innovation is chock-full of “geniuses” who begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from one category and simply applied them to another.

Excerpted from ‘The Big Moo’ edited by Seth Godin.

The author concluded the passage with a few time tested techniques for coming up with great ideas. All of the following could be part of that list, except