{"product_id":"the-ideadriven-organization-isbn-9781523088706","title":"The Idea-Driven Organization","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Examples from all over the world make it fun to read . . . convincingly demonstrate[s] the power of incorporating frontline thinking into your organization.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e–bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eTriggers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eToo many organizations overlook, or even suppress, their single most powerful source of growth and innovation—and it’s right under their noses. The frontline employees who interact directly with your customers, make your products, and provide your services have unparalleled insights into where problems exist and what improvements and new offerings would have the most impact.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn this follow-up to their bestseller \u003ci\u003eIdeas Are Free\u003c\/i\u003e, Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder show how to align every part of an organization around generating and implementing employee ideas and offer dozens of examples of what a tremendous competitive advantage this can offer—not just for revenue but for worker retention. Their advice enables leaders to build organizations capable of implementing twenty, fifty, or even a hundred ideas per employee per year.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eCiting organizations from around the world, they explain what’s needed to put together a management team that embraces grassroots ideas and describe the strategies, policies, and practices that enable them. They detail exactly how high-performing idea processes work and how to design one for your organization.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThere’s pressure today to do more with less. But cutting wages and benefits and pushing people to work harder with fewer resources can go only so far. Ironically, the best solution resides with the very people who’ve been bearing the brunt of these measures. With this book, you can unleash a constant stream of great ideas that will strengthen every facet of your organization.“\u003ci\u003eThe Idea-Driven Organization \u003c\/i\u003eis so reasonable that the magnitude of its change message is easy to miss. The richness of the examples from all over the world make it fun to read, and the authors convincingly demonstrate the power of incorporating frontline thinking into your organization.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Marshall Goldsmith, author of the \u003ci\u003eNew York \u003c\/i\u003eTimes bestsellers \u003ci\u003eMojo\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWhat Got You Here Won’t Get You There\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003c\/i\u003eAs leaders, we need to create an environment that effectively draws employee ideas out and empowers implementation.\u003ci\u003e The Idea-Driven Organization \u003c\/i\u003eprovides a practical map on how to get there.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Jeff Nagel, CEO, NBTY Inc.\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Robinson and Schroeder have written a manifesto that might very well spark a revolution. They show us how the ideas generated by the knowledge and creativity of frontline employees can help any organization, large or small, public or private, become more efficient, more productive, more innovative. I say let the revolution begin!”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Stan Rosenberg, Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “All outcomes measures are influenced by one critical factor: the number of employee ideas implemented by the frontline employees themselves. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder present research findings in many companies and industries that clearly confirm this but also explain how great leaders make it happen.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—John Toussaint, former CEO, ThedaCare, and author of \u003ci\u003eOn the Mend \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003ePotent Medicine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The idea-driven organization is one that steadfastly listens to its people to ensure the organization remains safe, responsible, productive, and continuously improving. Robinson and Schroeder provide an insightful guide for leaders who are vested in engaging the minds of their frontline employees.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Kevin S. Crutchfield, Chairman and CEO, Alpha Natural Resources\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No one has captured the rationale and how-tos for achieving business results through frontline involvement as elegantly and convincingly as Schroeder and Robinson have. Learning how to unleash the significant power of ideas is quite possibly the most important leadership skill needed today.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Karen Martin, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Outstanding Organization   \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Idea-Driven Organization\u003c\/i\u003e does not focus on some consultant-created magic formula but offers practical concepts for promoting employee ideas that you can read and implement on your own. This book is indispensable for any leader who wants to truly engage his or her employees.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Corey Rosen, PhD, founder and former Executive Director, National Center for Employee Ownership\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Idea-Driven Organization\u003c\/i\u003e is an exciting book that makes a compelling case for a simple but very powerful concept—business leaders who learn how to leverage the know-how and ideas of their frontline people will have a major winning edge because most of their competitors either don’t get it or don’t know how to do it. The detailed and provocative case examples are a major strength of the book—they show how business leaders can put ideas into action by tapping the expertise in their own organization.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Lee Bolman, coauthor of \u003ci\u003eReframing Organizations\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “We’re at the end of the age of being able to do more with less based on tired old management models and thinking. To thrive in the new era, organizations will need to be idea driven. Fortunately, Robinson and Schroeder have written a must-read guide for leaders looking to make this transformation.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Chip R. Bell, coauthor of \u003ci\u003eManaging Knock Your Socks Off Service\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eManagers as Mentors\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \"\u003ci\u003eThe Idea-Driven Organization\u003c\/i\u003e is a challenge to the dominant paradigm of 'Manager Knows Best', replacing it with a more balanced program of top-directed but bottom-driven initiative to keep creativity and productivity flowing.  It is no less than a call for a complete house cleaning – from physical and spatial relationships, to organization and information flows, and to changing the mindsets of employees and management alike! Required reading in an increasingly globalized and competitive world.\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Dean Cycon, Founder and CEO, Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company and winner of a 2013 Oslo Business for Peace award and the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles Leadership Award for Community Engagement\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Robinson and Schroeder have learned from experience the power of people at the front line of the organization actively identifying and solving problems. Building on their previous book, \u003ci\u003eIdeas Are Free\u003c\/i\u003e, they tell us how to create an environment to encourage the free flow of ideas to become a high performing organization.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—Jeffrey K. Liker, PhD, Professor, University of Michigan, and author of \u003ci\u003eThe Toyota Way\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To succeed in business today, it is absolutely essential that you tap into the ideas, creativity, and innovation of every member of your team. Working with companies around the world, I have seen that one of the greatest roadblocks to their success is a failure to truly get the most possible value from their talent. I am extremely impressed with this book and have recommended it to many of my clients. The authors lay out a superb blueprint, with lots of tools and examples, for creating an idea-driven organization. This is one of those rare must-read books.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—John Spence, author of \u003ci\u003eAwesomely Simple\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eAlan G. Robinson is a professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Robinson and Schroeder have advised hundreds of organizations in more than twenty-five countries on how to improve their performance.\u003cbr\u003e Dean M. Schroeder is the Herbert and Agnes Schulz Professor of Management at Valparaiso University. Robinson and Schroeder have advised hundreds of organizations in more than twenty-five countries on how to improve their performance.\u003cb\u003ePREFACE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eAFTER YEARS OF BEING ASKED to do more with less, managers are increasingly aware that they cannot produce the results that are expected of them with the organizations they currently have and the methods they currently use.\u003cbr\u003eWe have now been doing more with less for so long that we have reached a point where further demands can no longer be met by simply tweaking our existing organizations or management methods. Cutting wages, perks, and benefits and pushing people to work harder  can go only so far. A different approach is needed. Interestingly, the best solution involves the very people that have been bearing the brunt of the cost so far: ordinary employees.\u003cbr\u003eEvery day, front-line employees see many problems and opportunities that their managers do not. They have plenty of ideas to improve produc- tivity and customer service, to offer new or better products or services, or to enhance their organizations in other ways. But their organizations usu- ally do better at suppressing these ideas than promoting them.\u003cbr\u003eIn our experience, most managers have difficulty believing that there is enough value in employee ideas to justify the effort of going after them. But as we shall explain, some \u003ci\u003e80 percent \u003c\/i\u003eof an organization’s potential for improvement lies in front-line ideas. This fact means that organizations that are not set up to listen to and act on front-line ideas are using at best only a fifth of their improvement engines. And much of their innovation\u003cbr\u003epotential is locked up in the same way. When managers gain the ability to implement twenty, fifty, or even a hundred ideas per person per year,\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eeverything changes\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003eToday, a growing number of idea-driven organizations have become very good at promoting front-line ideas and as a result are reaching extraor- dinary levels of performance. Whereas traditional  organizations are directed and driven from the top, idea-driven organizations are directed from the top but are \u003ci\u003edriven by ideas from the bottom\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003eA number of years ago, we wrote \u003ci\u003eIdeas Are Free, \u003c\/i\u003ein which we artic- ulated and documented  what becomes possible when an organization aggressively pursues front-line ideas. We described companies with the best idea systems in the world and the extraordinary advantages these systems provide. This vision attracted numerous  leaders and managers around the world. Some ran with it and were quite successful. But others struggled. We began to get a lot of calls for help.\u003cbr\u003eAs we worked alongside managers and leaders trying to implement high-performance idea systems, we learned two important lessons. First, while getting the mechanics of an idea process right is certainly impor- tant, to get good results from it often requires significant changes in the way an organization is led, structured, and managed. Second, whereas it is one thing to understand how idea-driven organizations work, it is quite another to know how to create one. These realizations are what led us to write this book\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe began to study the process by which organizations become idea driven. We dug deeply into the operating contexts of many idea-driven organizations, to learn how they accomplished what they did. We also looked at organizations that were just taking their first steps toward becoming idea driven and followed them in near-real time to get a richer understanding of precisely what \u003ci\u003eworks\u003c\/i\u003e, and what \u003ci\u003edoes not, \u003c\/i\u003ealong the way. At the same time, our work with leaders and managers who asked for help allowed us to test, refine, and then retest the concepts and advice in this book.\u003cbr\u003eIn some ways this book is about instigating nothing short of a revolu- tion in the way organizations are run. But at the same time, we have tried to lay out a logical, incremental, learn-as-you-go approach to creating an idea-driven organization. Still, this is not an easy journey, and managers choosing to take it will need courage and persistence, as the transforma- tion will take time and effort. But the lessons in this book will guide them in making the necessary changes with far less pain than their pioneering predecessors, and to quickly producing significant bottom-line results.The bottom line is this: Idea-driven organizations have many times the improvement and innovation capability of their traditional counter- parts. If you learn how to tap the ideas of your front-line workers, you can truly break free of the reductionist “more with less” mindset. You and your employees will thrive in environments where you once would have struggled to survive.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA final note: \u003c\/b\u003eA lot can be learned by failure. Because we want to share examples of failure without embarrassing the people involved, our policy was to disguise the names of people and institutions whose stories might be construed in any way as negative.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Power in Front-Line Ideas\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e WHAT IS  THE BIGGEST  SHORTFALL  in the way we practice manage- ment today? With all the money pouring into business schools and execu- tive education, and all the books, articles and experts to consult, why do so many organizations still fall so painfully short of their potential? What have their leaders and managers been missing?\u003cbr\u003eThere is no single reason for the less-than-brilliant performance of these organizations, of course, but one limiting factor is clear. Very few managers know how to effectively tap the biggest source of performance improvement available to them—namely, the creativity and knowledge of the people who work for them.\u003cbr\u003eEvery day, these people see problems and opportunities  that their managers do not. They are full of ideas to save money or time; increase revenue; make their jobs easier; improve productivity, quality, and the cus- tomer experience; or make their organizations better in some other way.\u003cbr\u003eFor more than a century, people have dabbled with various approaches to promoting employee ideas, but with little real success. In recent years, however, the picture has changed. As we shall see, companies with the best idea systems in the world now routinely implement twenty, fifty, or even a hundred ideas per person per year. As a result they perform at extraor-\u003cbr\u003edinarily high levels and are able to consistently deliver innovative new products and services. Their customers enjoy working with them, and they are rewarding places to work.\u003cbr\u003eThis book is about how to build such an organization—an \u003ci\u003eidea-driven organization\u003c\/i\u003e—one designed and led to systematically seek and implement large numbers of (mostly small) ideas from \u003ci\u003eeveryone, \u003c\/i\u003ebut particularly from the people on the front lines. We are aware, of course, that many organi- zations are famous for their innovativeness but are \u003ci\u003enot \u003c\/i\u003eidea driven in our sense, because the preponderance of their ideas comes from a handful of highly creative departments or perhaps a lone genius. But however successful these organizations already are, they would be even more success- ful, and more sustainably innovative, if they were to become idea driven.\u003cbr\u003eAs an example of an idea-driven organization, let us look at Brasilata, which has been consistently named as one of the most innovative com- panies in Brazil by the FINEP (Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos), that country’s science and development agency. Surprisingly, Brasilata is in the steel can industry, a two-hundred-year-old  industry that was viewed as mature before the Soviet Union launched \u003ci\u003eSputnik \u003c\/i\u003ein 1957. And yet 75 percent of Brasilata’s products either are protected by patents or have been developed within the last five years. How can a company in such a mature industry be as innovative as Brazil’s more well-known and high-flying technology, aerospace, energy, cosmetics, and fashion companies? Every year, Brasilata’s nearly 1,000 “inventors” (the job titles of its front-line employees) come up with some 150,000 ideas, 90 percent of which are implemented.\u003cbr\u003eBuilding an idea-driven organization such as Brasilata is not easy. There is a lot to know, much of which is counterintuitive. It took almost twenty years for Antonio Texeira, Brasilata’s CEO, to build the processes and culture capable of this kind of idea performance. He and his leadership team had no readily available models to follow, no classes they could attend, and no experts to call for advice. They had to figure things out as they went.\u003cbr\u003eToday, there is a small but growing number of idea-driven organiza- tions, and their collective experiences allow us to ferret out what \u003ci\u003eworks \u003c\/i\u003eand what \u003ci\u003edoesn’t \u003c\/i\u003ewhen it comes to managing front-line ideas. This book lays out the general principles involved and describes how to methodically transform an ordinary organization into one that is idea driven. But before we get into how to do this, let us get a better sense of the power of front-line ideas by delving in some detail into another idea-driven organization—a company in Sweden whose idea system has won several national awards. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE CLARION-STOCKHOLM HOTEL\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe Clarion-Stockholm is a four-star hotel located in the center of Stock- holm. It routinely averages more than fifty ideas per year from each of its employees—about one idea per person per week. One reason that Clarion employees are able to come up with so many ideas is that they have been trained to look for problems and opportunities to improve. For example, every time a guest complains, asks a question, or seems confused, staff members do all they can to fully understand the issue. If staffers have an idea to address the issue, they enter it into a special computer application. If not, they enter just the raw problem. Each department has a weekly idea meeting to review its ideas and problems, and decide on the actions it wants to take on each of them.\u003cbr\u003eWe met with several bartenders and went through all of their depart- ment’s ideas from a randomly selected month. A sample of them is listed in Table 1.1.\u003cbr\u003eAs you read through these ideas, notice five things. First, the ideas are responding to problems and opportunities that are easily seen by the bar staff, but not so readily by their managers. How would the managers know that customers are asking for organic cocktails (Tess’s idea) or vitamin shots (Fredrik’s idea), or that the bartenders could serve more beer if an extra beer tap were added (Marin’s idea)? Such insights come much more easily to employees who are serving the customers directly.\u003cbr\u003eSecond, most of the ideas are small and straightforward. They don’t require much work to analyze and are inexpensive to implement. How difficult is it for the conference sales department  to give the bartenders a “heads-up” that it will be meeting in the bar with a customer who is considering booking a major event (Nadia’s idea)? And how hard is it to increase the font size of the print on coupons given to conference partici- pants so as to clarify what they mean (Marco’s idea) or to give the restaurant staff a tasting of the new bar cocktails so they can sell them more effectively to their diners (Tim’s idea)?","brand":"Berrett-Koehler Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301707174117,"sku":"NP9781523088706","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781523088706.jpg?v=1767739891","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-ideadriven-organization-isbn-9781523088706","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}