Employees in a negotiation training workshop are chatting happily in a company cafeteria near San Francisco. They're not on break. They're on assignment. Their objective: to discover three things they didn't know--and wouldn't have guessed--about each other. The exercise isn't about the information, though. It's about the methods they used to get…

Discusses encouraging creativity and innovation in an organization. It examines creative training, creative problem solving, fostering creativity, how several corporations are teaching creativity to employees, what chief executive officers think of creativity workshops for employees, and the difference between the logical and creative approaches…

The recession, reorganization of work, and total quality management are spurring emphasis on creativity training in the workplace. A wide spectrum of techniques are being used to influence the generation of new ideas, although documentation of the benefits is difficult. (SK)

Presents (with tongue in cheek) a four-style behavior model guaranteed to produce excellence in the four types of trainees: nematodes (docile but learn nothing), gerbils (fond of noncompetitive games and hugging), warthogs (like to attend expensive seminars), and Cro-Magnon (like to interpret to others as opposed to actually learning anything…