Earlier this week my son (Ethan) came to our offices to hang out.  He knew we did work for Lego and found a stack of unopened Lego sets under one of the desks.  We opened one of the boxes and he began building.  When he left we just left the Legos on the conference table.

I had always hoped that as the team here at Big in Japan grew the interaction between our people would result in great new ideas.  In reality we all get busy with projects and rarely have time to just ‘hang out’.  Yesterday I woke up and decided that I would work on the business, instead of in the business for the day.  Quickly I realized that I needed to engage the team directly in order to figure out what was ‘next’. 

I tried to get everyone engaged, but with PDAs, cell phones, interruptions, Twitter, email and computers just laying around everywhere it was almost impossible to get everyone’s attention at the same time.  One by one the team began ‘fiddling’ with the Lego parts on the table and our meeting shifted from a speech to a discussion.  Mike came up with a great idea.  Jake had a good point.  Scott added a bunch.  It was great.  The Legos provided the guys with a harmless distraction from their ‘personal technology’ devices.  It was still hard, my phone must have rang once every five minutes ~ I resisted the temptation to even look who was calling.  Perhaps this will become a regular thing: harmless distractions to increase engagement!

Anyway, thanks Ethan!  Great idea. . .