I observed the power of engagement by team members and customers last weekend.  Petar and I I spent last weekend supporting the Joe Borrow Foundation’s golf event.  On Friday night we served Old Fashioned Cocktails at a pre event party.  On Saturday we were hole seven providing golfers with a tasting sample of our Dexter Three Wood Bourbon.   

During the weekend I had a unique opportunity to observe the behavior of the attendees as many learned about and experienced our Dexter Bourbon for the first time.   I was struck by how clear and obvious it was that we were creating engagement with the brand.  AND, how similar it was to what we observe when we work with leadership to create engagement among team members with PROACTIVE Problem Solving of broken systems in the work place.  

It didn’t take a survey to quantify the impact…..

1. Engaged team members & customers ARE OVERT in their excitement.  

When folks experience something that is truly meaningfully unique – be it a new way of working or a 96 point Bourbon they let you know it immediately.  You can see it on their face instantly.  And, they just HAVE TO TELL YOU how much they enjoy the experience.  The reason for this might well be the dozens of disappointments they’ve experienced when the training or whiskey didn’t live up to their expectations.

2. Engaged team members & customers TELL OTHERS about their learning.

Interestingly the event the night before with about 25% of those who were playing golf lit the excitement for Dexter.   Throughout the day, as the golfers came up to hole seven and saw Petar and I – we could hear those who had experienced us the night before tell the others in their group about how amazing Dexter was.    It’s the same with team members at companies.  When the lady who participated in PROACTIVE Problem Solving was able to Stop The Stupid way that she worked – so that she could vaporize the need for rework – she just had to tell others about it.  That my friends is how you create true and lasting Culture Change.

3. Engaged team members & customers PROACTIVELY Engage Others.

Beyond simply telling others – those who are truly engaged proactively engage others.  At the party the night before – when a participant had what they called “the best old fashioned in their life” they brought others over to our bar asking us to tell our story and make one.  On the golf course, folks drove their golf cart back to us to get another sample to take to a friend.   It’s the same with PROACTIVE Problem Solving – when someone is full engaged I’ve observed that they don’t take no for an answer.  They inevitably pull out a tool they learned and teach it / use it with others they want to enroll in the culture change movement.

To learn more simply click to learn more on links at the bottom. 

If you are in the UK click on link below for tickets to my three speaking events in early June.

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

I’m On My Way to London & Glasgow in early June… 

Here’s information on my UK speaking events: 

✅ Monday 9th June (AM) in Glasgow

✅ Tuesday 10th June in London

✅ Friday 13th June in London

FOR DETAILS ON UK EVENTS CLICK HERE

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE

Stopping the Stupid is becoming a rallying cry at organizations who are activating their team members and managers to confront the small yet frequent flaws in work systems that get in the way of personal and organizational success.   

Here’s a just a couple recent stories of victory by team members who are ignited as PROACTIVE Problem Solvers of Broken Work Systems. 

Stopping the Stupid – Warehouse Reorganization Saves 7 minutes/order.   The company fulfills about 150 orders for spare or replacement parts each day.  The team that picks and packs the parts for shipping recently found a way to Stop The Stupid amount of walking they do each day.   They saved 7 minutes of walking for each order by moving the 200 top selling parts to racks near the front of the warehouse.  Voila! Less walking and greater productivity.

Stopping the Stupid – Educating the People Entering The Data – A team was responsible for checking the paperwork associated with custom orders.   It was a very frustrating job as some 90% of the time an error was made on the forms. They sorted the mistakes and found the three input areas on the forms that constituted the highest percentage of errors.  Then, they went to each error source to identify the cause of the errors.  To their surprise it was mostly because of change over in staffing.  New people that were assigned to enter the data were not being trained properly.  When they instituted new training, VOILA!, the mistake levels dropped immediately. 

In both cases – the solution was not “rocket science” rather it was simple common sense.  And, it was activated by those close to the work – working with their team leader.

Friends – YOU TOO can STOP THE STUPID that prevents you and your team from realizing personal and organizational success.

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

I’m On My Way to London & Glasgow in early June… 

Here’s information on my UK speaking events: 

✅ Monday 9th June (AM) in Glasgow, with National Manufacturing Institute Scotland REGISTER

✅ Tuesday 10th June in London, with Space Network REGISTER

✅ Friday 13th June in London, with THE CENTRE FOR TEAMS LIMITED for Teams and Institute of Physics REGISTER

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE

The adventure of life can exhaust and excite you.   As it turns out, daily physical exercise may be one of the best ways to excite and engage your body, mind, and spirit. 

Research finds that adults who work out regularly are more successful than their couch-potato colleagues. The Research was conducted by Michale Goldsby – of Ball State University.  It involved a study of over 300 business owners on their exercise habits, business results and life satisfaction.  He found that business owners who were weight lifters or runners were  significantly more satisfied with their business results and had significantly higher sales results. 

A separate research study found that when you engage in aerobic exercise there is an improvement in creativity. The key is to engage in any exercise that involves a rhythmic effort – such as swimming, running or cycling. It is thought that these types of exercises quiets the conscious mind and allows you to access ideas from your subconscious.

In my life I have had an on-and-off relationship with exercise.  At the start of 2025 I committed to making aerobic and weight training part of my daily life.  It took 6 weeks to move me from being reluctant to actually looking forward to exercise.   Interestingly, I might have stumbled onto a way to increase my motivation.  In addition to exercising I also dedicated 10 to 15 minutes each morning on mindfulness exercises.  Yesterday I read a study released last month that found that when adults did 10 minutes of mindfulness exercises each day they exercised for 373 minutes a week versus 297 minutes of exercise for the control group.   

This research, and my personal experience, finds that the structured practice of mindfulness – non-judgmentally paying attention to one’s mental and physical experience, and surroundings – encourages more health-promoting behaviors and better health outcomes.

So what are you waiting for.  Mindfully Engage Your Brain.  Then Get Up.  Get Out and Get Going with Exercise.

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

I’m On My Way to London & Glasgow in early June… 

Here’s information on my UK speaking events: 

✅ Monday 9th June (AM) in Glasgow, with National Manufacturing Institute Scotland

✅ Tuesday 10th June in London, with Space Network

✅ Friday 13th June in London, with THE CENTRE FOR TEAMS LIMITED for Teams and Institute of Physics

🎟️ Registration opens soon so keep an eye out for Eventbrite links on LinkedIn.

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE

Forty years ago I founded the Eureka! Ranch with a focus on inventing BIG IDEAS for new products or services. This remains a foundation of our work.

However today leaders are also asking us to help them double their level of employee engagement in PROACTIVE Problem Solving of broken or flawed work systems.  

Work systems matter because as the famous statistician Dr. W. Edwards Deming taught, “94% of problems are due to the system, 6% are caused by the workers.”  

Shifting from passive acceptance to proactive action requires a mindset shift from tolerating inefficiencies to intentionally identifying and correcting them. The mantra for this movement is “STOP STUPID. START SMART.”. It’s about refusing to accept “just the way it is” and taking smart, structured action to fix underlying issues with the work systems.

In working with leadership on changing the mindset of managers and team members I’ve learned three things.

1. Change by adults only happens when they are ready to change.   As artist Andy Warhol said “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change  if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.” I’ve found that it’s best to start a change movement by asking for volunteers who for what ever reason have had enough with the “stupid stuff” that they have to deal with day after day.   As that group sees success in vaporizing “the stupid” others become interested. 
2. Courage to take action is best built through a series of small wins.   That’s why we start by challenging them to take proactive action on problems they face that are within their sphere of influence.  We also encourage them to start small – get wins to build their confidence and capability to fix broken work systems. 
3. Leadership’s personal engagement with System Thinking makes a difference.  When key members of the leadership of an organization are seen taking classes in PROACTIVE Problem Solving the employees take the new mindset more seriously.  Even more importantly, when leaders are applying what they learned about how to proactively fix broken systems there is even greater buy in by the organization.   Just today I spoke with a manager at a company that said to me “I was skeptical about system thinking – but when I saw the company President using the teaching to solve a problem we face in a meeting – I decided it’s time for me to learn this stuff too.”  Note – managers and team members will succeed without leadership engagement.  It will just take longer for the culture to change. 

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE

Will Holder, my Great Grandfather, would understand the chaos of today’s marketplace.  His sailmaking business in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, went through many changes.  As the age of sailing ships declined, he developed new opportunities for custom awnings and tarps.  He also embraced technological changes by bringing the first sewing machine into a sail loft in Canada.  

 At the age of 95, looking back at his many years as an entrepreneur, he described his life philosophy with these simple words:

“One time you’re down, another time you’re up, 
then you’re down again and you come up again.”

In the spirit of my Great Grandfather I too embrace never ending change to address the never ending ups and downs of life.

A Simple Way to Find Ideas to take you from “Down to UP!”  A simple approach to finding a way from “down to up,” in your personal or professional life is to use “Free Writing” to think deeply about your challenges and frustrations.  It is similar to brainstorming, but your insights and ideas are written in sentence form without stopping.  To get started think like a newspaper reporter describing the WHAT, WHY, HOW, WHO of the challenge you face.  Write continuously until you have nothing left to say.  Then put the writing away and a few hours or the next morning, come back to it.

Read Your Writing Out Loud:  Take what you wrote and read it out loud in a full voice.  Then write it all over again on a fresh piece of paper or computer screen.  Repeat the process of writing – letting the subconscious work – read out loud and then write again. 

Why This Process Works:  Three things make this process work:  1) Writing continuously identifies real and concrete insights and ideas that are in your head, 2) Pausing and putting away your writing for a period of time allows time for your subconscious mind to make fresh connections and 3) Research indicates that reading your writing out loud in a full voice gives you new insights into what you are saying AND how you are communicating it.

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE

LIMITED TIME 99 Cent E-book Offer

THANK YOU – because of your support
My PROACTIVE Problem Solving Book
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My goal with this newsletter is to provide you with ideas and insights for how you can ignite employee engagement in PROACTIVE Problem Solving of flawed & broken human work systems.   The process involves 1) Defining Problems & Solutions, 2) Creating Solutions & 3) Driving out RISK as you Bring Your Idea to Life. 

This edition of the PPS Newsletter focuses on a proven way to aid you creation of solutions

The value of sunlight to help you think quicker, smarter and more creatively is something that Walt Disney believed.  New scientific research confirms it to be a fact.  Working and thinking in full spectrum  – sunlight kick starts your brain. 

The research study was monstrous– involving 750 classrooms and over 21,000 students.  It found that children in classrooms with the most daylight, learned 20 to 26 percent faster than students with the least amount of day light.  Even standardized test results in math and reading increased significantly. 

When we were designing the Eureka! Ranch, Doug lead a Eureka! Session for  the Walt Disney company at the Studio in California.  While there, he got a VIP tour of the animation studio, with it’s abundance of windows for natural light.  It made such an impression.  The Eureka! Ranch great room has a two story wall of south facing windows and multiple skylights.

The lesson here is simple – open the curtains, pull up the shades, get up, get out and let the sun shine in to stimulate your cranium this spring.

Cheers

Doug Hall 

Founder – Eureka! Ranch
Co-Founder – Dexter Bourbon Company from the Brain Brew Distillery
Co-Founder – Eureka! Ranch Distilled Spirits Group

LIMITED TIME offer PROACTIVE Problem Solving ebook for 99 Cents

Click to learn more about:  DOUG’S Bio     DOUG’S Services     DOUG’S Books

Click to SEND DOUG A MESSAGE