Why should you have an internal mastermind group?

While it’s comforting to just collect your senior management around you for meetings it’s also limiting.

Just because you worked a job 10 years ago doesn’t automatically mean that remember the subtle details of the work or that you will know about the changes or new ideas that have happened in the last 10 years.

A mastermind group should be people from both your industry and outsiders who can help you both create new ideas and develop plans to execute the best of those new ideas. You may need more than one group, one for new product ideas, one for manufacturing, one for finance, etc.

You have that mastermind group because bitter experience (yours or someone else’s) has taught you that you are not an expert in all the things you need to know to run your business. Some of that may be interest and not ability. You could learn all the information to fix your car yourself, but would rather spend your time growing your business and developing new products or fixing your car? Most of us just hire a mechanic.

The janitor’s hobby of flying radio control airplanes may have exposed him to a great advertising campaign that could help you, when suitably modified to your particular product by the marketing department. Or maybe that idea will be from finance guy with a new way of financing R&D.

Whatever that new idea, having a collection of advisers with varied backgrounds will provide you with a huge collection of new ideas to draw on. Not all of them will be winners, but as Benjamin Franklin said: Insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results.

Drawing on the same restricted pool of thinkers will always result in the same restricted views.