People used to think that only a small minority could rule. We in America proved that that is not true. But still people think that only a few people can have ideas, that there is a sort of Divine Right of Intellectuals. That is not true, either. The art of having ideas can be taught, developed, and mastered by a great share of our population.

This does not mean, of course, that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can have great ideas. What it does mean is that most of us can have ideas of some dimension, ideas that can make our world a better and richer place in which to live.

When you practice brainstorming, you will be amazed at the ideas you will have.

Once you start having a flood of ideas, and after you see them going to work to solve problems that have previously been unsolvable, you will start having original ideas in all sorts of situations which have previously been stultifying and unproductive. You will go to committee meetings and conferences, to conversations with your boss or your secretary, to hours of work alone in your office, and you will find new thoughts popping up in old routines. You will become impatient with the old negative decisions, the casual dismissal of unorthodox thoughts. You will be irritated when your company or your associates run away from the real problems or give up without really trying to solve them. Personally, you will be motivated to have new ideas and to put them to work.

And don't forget that last point. When you create a backlog of new, exciting, workable, challenging ideas they demand to be put to work. They are a constant force pushing you on.

Problems that might have been solved with your ideas and have been bypassed will be a daily goad to you to try to get them working. Here again brainstorming goes to work. You will brainstorm new ways of turning your ideas into action.

You will brainstorm the problem of selling new ideas in your company, and you will come up with workable techniques which will not only sell your ideas, but create an atmosphere in which other good ideas which have been made idle by old prejudices and negative thinking can be put on the job of problem-solving.

You will also find that you will get much more mileage out of your ideas than you ever expect. Say, for example, that you have responsibility for a packaging problem. You may brainstorm, "How to package product X," and come up with 133 ideas. You may use only four or five of the ideas, but now you have an inventory of more than a hundred ideas from which you can easily choose ones to solve problems in packaging products Y and Z. You will find yourself consciously and subconsciously reaching back into this inventory during your daily work, and a year or two later the investment of a thirty-five-minute brainstorm session will still be paying rich dividends.

Most important of all, perhaps, is that each of us too easily accepts what we think is the inevitable. We classify too many of our problems as impossible, or worse still, accept that clas­sification from somebody else. Once we have practiced brainstorming and discovered the magic of new ideas, we will find our horizons retreating far before us. Our old job will become a new adventure, a fresh challenge waiting to respond to the vigor of one person's creative thinking.

Brainstorming, however, has rich results for management as well as for the individual. Every corporation has a vast natural resource of people who possess new, vital talent. Every company must depend on new ideas, a process of re-examination and re-creation if it is to maintain its status or to improve it in a competitive world. Brainstorming is one way a corporation can cut through the forest of organization to find new talent and encourage it. In every department there are people bogged down in detail, paralyzed by routine, who have the ability within themselves to produce money-making ideas. Usually they do not even know they have this skill, and if they do, often as not they feel they have no way to express it.

Inadvertently many a company has placed an "Ideas Not Wanted" sign on each executive door. Brainstorming tears down those signs. It reaches the people who can create. It stimulates them, jogs management, and gives expression to the creative human resource within the corporation.