Unhelpful ideas include dismissing any negative press or government proposals as a conspiracy against charities, or suggesting that these matters are synthetic or concocted and can be disregarded.
This would allow faculty to reach out to wider audiences, rather than be, as Messrs Bennis and O'Toole put it, "damned as popularisers".But that might also risk granting tenure on the basis of trendy but ultimately unhelpful ideas.
Besides his occasional fumbles on policy (and a strange fondness for intellectual gimmicks, such as the "Big Society", an unhelpful slogan for his ideas), Mr Cameron's main weakness is a yearning to be liked.
The people at the call centre were unhelpful, unsympathetic, and had no idea about the history of the problem.
But the "Global Zero" idea is an unhelpful distraction because it inclines Republicans to believe Obama is not serious about maintaining and modernizing America's nuclear arsenal.
Most such ideas might be unhelpful.
It's an unhelpful term as this is an idea that gay people find themselves constantly battling against.
Unable to explain why people risk their time and money on new ideas, orthodox economics is equally unhelpful in answering the most interesting question in economics: why some nations surge ahead while others stagnate.
Like Baron-Cohen, Philip Zimbardo – who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 – implies that the idea of an evil person is unhelpful, because it obscures more tangible factors that account for human cruelty.
Every Christmas, the magazines (and, increasingly, newspapers) are filled with features and supplements that offer "ideas" for the most basic, obvious, unhelpful presents you could list.
