It sounds more like reality TV than a reasoned strategy. Last year, Best Buy picked four groups of salespeople in their 20s and early 30s and asked the strangers to room together for 10 weeks in a Los Angeles apartment complex. On the agenda, besides hanging out at the beach: coming up with businesses the electronics retailer could roll out quickly and cheaply. Believe it or not, the arrangement worked. Today, in a dozen stores in greater Los Angeles, Best Buy offers a service called Best Buy Studio, which provides Web-design consulting for small businesses. Jeremy Sevush, a former sales floor department supervisor in West Hollywood, came up with the idea and then worked with executives to launch the venture only a couple of weeks after he moved out of the company apartment last May. “My friends joked and said I was joining ‘Real World: Best Buy Edition,’ ” says Sevush, 29, referring to the MTV television series that features a youthful cast sharing a home. “Living together and knowing we only had 10 weeks sped up our team-building process. We voluntarily worked longer hours, talking about business models while making spaghetti.” Extreme brainstorming sessions like Best Buy’s may be common in the tech sector, where programmers and engineers are sequestered so they can better focus on the next breakthrough. Now other companies are turning employees into temporary housemates, too. Whirlpool, for example, packs eight sales reps off to a house in Benton Harbor, Michigan, to cook and clean together for seven weeks under a program called Real Whirled. By thoroughly familiarizing themselves with Whirlpool appliances, the company hopes, salespeople will become sharper marketers of the goods. 

Questions 

1. What kind of decision making takes place at the extreme brainstorming sessions companies like Best Buy are using? 

2. For which steps in the decision-making process might these kinds of sessions be especially important? 

3. Why might more creative ideas be generated in these kinds of sessions? 

4. Why does Best Buy encourage frontline employees to generate new ideas?