The Idea-Driven Organization: Unlocking the Power in Bottom-Up Ideas - Softcover

Robinson, Alan G.; Schroeder, Dean M.

 
9781523088706: The Idea-Driven Organization: Unlocking the Power in Bottom-Up Ideas
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1523088702 ISBN 13: 9781523088706
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

“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 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers
 
Too 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.
 
In this follow-up to their bestseller Ideas Are Free, 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.
 
Citing 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.
 
There’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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan 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.
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.

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PREFACE
 
AFTER 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.
We 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.
Every 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.
In 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 80 percent of 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
potential 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,
everything changes.
Today, 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 driven by ideas from the bottom.
A number of years ago, we wrote Ideas Are Free, in 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.
As 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.
We 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 works, and what does not, along 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.
In 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.
 
 
A final note: A 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.


1
The Power in Front-Line Ideas
 
 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?
There 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.
Every 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.
For 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-
dinarily 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.
This book is about how to build such an organization—an idea-driven organization—one designed and led to systematically seek and implement large numbers of (mostly small) ideas from everyone, but particularly from the people on the front lines. We are aware, of course, that many organi- zations are famous for their innovativeness but are not idea 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.
As 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 Sputnik in 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,...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1523088702
ISBN 13 
9781523088706
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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