Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations

This is a book about transformation and the leadership it takes to achieve it. The obvious premise of this book is that "ideas" can transform an average company into a great one, or a struggling organization into a competitive success. The power to achieve this is in simple everyday ideas from the people who really know where the problems exist, the front line workers. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder have written a book that has its origins in the 1980's. Schroeder had discovered that the "employees of distressed companies could often identify and solve critical problems which management had either missed or ignored". Around the same time, Robinson was studying Japanese organizations and discovering how small ideas could lead to high employee involvement and superior performance. This book is a result of their research that led them into 150 different organizations in seventeen countries representing a diverse variety of industries. Ideas Are Free is a book that discusses how everyday common-sense ideas can make a powerful difference in any organization! Most American organizational cultures constantly search for the "big" revolutionary ideas that often are quickly duplicated by the competition. But it is the ongoing benefits derived from smaller innovations that can really make a huge difference. These small ideas tend to remain proprietary within the organization that utilizes them. Sadly, most organizations seem to ignore this opportunity and are better at suppressing ideas instead of promoting them! Ideas Are Free correctly focuses on the fact that the best ideas come from people who do the work and see many things the manager doesn't. Managers are good at squandering the most significant resource that organizations possess: employee ideas. Aside from innovation, another advantage of utilizing the ideas of employees is that the process pushes the decision-making authority back down to the people who do the work where it belongs. A secondary benefit is that managers are reminded every day of how valuable and productive ideas from the "front-line" can be. This should remind the manager to be less arrogant and more humble. This book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 convinces the reader that small ideas can drive a culture of high performance. It also provides an overview of the books main points. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the importance of going after small ideas, and examines why most common reward systems fail. Chapter 5 discusses how to create an effective process to deal with many new ideas, and how to make idea generation a part of everyone's job. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on helping employees engender more and better ideas, and how to make a good idea system a truly great one. Chapter 8 shows how a sound ideas system can make a positive change in the organization's culture. Most chapters end with suggested actions that any manager can adopt to promote ideas called "Guerrilla Tactics". Ideas Are Free is excellent

"Ideas Are Free: How The Idea Revolution Is Liberating People And Transforming Organizations" by Robinson and Schroeder is written for entrepreneurs and managers who want to encourage their employees to contribute ideas and insight to increase profitability and organizational efficiency. The authors argue that managing employee ideas is a crucial area for companies in today's rapidly changing business world. Companies which utilize employee ideas gain competitive advantages in efficiency, product development, understanding customers, and improving the company's culture. Yet, today, when asked, many company managers say they take a "family" approach and use an "informal" method of managing employee ideas. Robinson and Schroeder write: "Tellingly, however, these same managers are not as casual about other things. Take travel expenses, for example. Would these managers leave a big barrel of cash in the corner and tell employees who are travelling to take whatever they need, spend it wisely, and put back whatever they don't use? No need for receipts or a report, because they just get in the way, and 'we're just one big happy family?' ... No organization manages its money this way, because it would soon be out of business. It has to ensure that what is supposed to be happening is actually happening. And, of course, managers who claim-in the absence of any measurement or control mechanism-that large numbers of ideas in their organizations are naturally flowing to welcoming supervisors and being quickly implemented, are deluding themselves." Robinson and Schroeder tell us that many companies which want to encourage employee ideas do so badly, often discouraging employee idea contribution, but creating employee resentment, internal company sabotage, and manager resentment to the ideas. Robinson and Schroeder explain why traditional reward schemes for idea contribution often fail, but do succeed in generating animosity. For example, we learn that an employee of a large wireless company discovered an annual $26 million billing error due to a significant number of international phone calls that the company failed to record properly. The employee dutifully placed his idea for a simple fix in the company suggestion box. Robinson and Schroeder write: "Under the rules of the company's idea system, once the idea was implemented, the suggester would be owed 50 percent of the first year's revenue from it-in this case some $13 million. At the time we visited the company, top management had been 'evaluating' the idea for several years. The idea system manager was furious. The CEO would rather continue losing $26 million per year, he told us, than risk the embarrassment that might ensue from having to pay such a large reward. The sheer size of the oversight would make any manager reluctant to admit that it had happened on his or her watch. A $13 million reward ... would have come to the attention of his board. ...Think of the negative publicity: Not only had m

The theme of employee suggestions is not new. But this book provides answers and strong motivation to try out again. The things that I learned from reading the book are: 1) Why rewards based on value of saving does not work. 2) A series of small ideas adds up to one Big one. 3) Even big ideas needs small ideas to get them working right. 4) Small ideas are not easily copied. 5) A properly implemented idea system improve management - employee relations 6) Successfully implemented ideas system is the key to competitive advantage and sustainable long term performance. Please read the book for the details. Highly recommended.

How did Toyota rise from being an obscure automaker to being "Number Three" in "The Big Three?" How did Toyota come to dominate the J.D. Powers Consumer Satisfaction Survey? And why is it Toyota has not laid off a single worker since 1950? Ideas. Toyota uses hundreds more ideas per worker than do its American counterparts. While Toyota is a stunning example of how one company gets and uses employee ideas, this book isn't about Toyota. It's about liberating people and transforming organizations through ideas. Not necessarily big ideas, but ideas that come from every person in the organization and add up to big things. The typical organization is an idea desert. This well-researched book shows you, through case histories and clear explanations, how any organization can transform that desert into a lush land that produces bumper crops. One key is tapping into the vast resource of employees who are closest to the work. Managers have a perspective that is excellent for addressing the larger picture. But to have that perspective, managers are necessarily removed from being close to the work. Thus, they simply are not in a position to see how to improve the work. Another important concept that many managers fail to put to use is that of massively parallel eyes, ears, and brains. Joseph Antonini taught us that ignoring these inputs is very dangerous--he nearly ruined K-Mart by assuming his ideas were the only ones that really mattered. We have to remember that employees are often leaders and thinkers outside of work. They rear children, hold leadership positions in their churches, hold leadership positions in their trade or professional organizations, conduct neighborhood watches, pay mortgages, coach softball teams, teach children how to ride bikes, care for their aged parents, plan vacation trips, plan and prepare meals for guests, conduct hundreds of financial transactions each year, safely navigate their way around strange neighborhoods or even cities they have never been to before, conduct research at their library and online, send their spouses or children off to war and support them across vast oceans, and.... You get the point. And this is a point that Ideas Are Free brings to front and center. Companies who treat employees as a brain trust have an enormous advantage over companies that treat employees as a cost they'd like to eliminate. This book shows you how to treat employees as a brain trust, based on what other companies have successfully done. It also alerts you to some pitfalls and explains why certain approaches don't work. The competitive advantage that will most determine the future of any company is brainpower. It's not a matter of hiring bright people. It's a matter of correctly managing the brainpower you already have. And that's why I recommend Ideas Are Free to anyone who is in a management position. In today's globally competitive environment, you can't afford to operate on the same premise Antonini did.

Empowering employees to do the right thing is a key idea in my Principled Profit philosophy. This principle can improve every aspect of a business, as Robinson and Schroeder demonstrate. In an empowered organization, employee ideas--especially those from front-line workers--are a currency with the capability to slash costs, boost morale and productivity, and in some cases yield enormous actual-dollar profitability. But too many organizations go about idea collection all wrong. Either they have no systematized method of collecting, analyzing, and acting on ideas--rapidly implementing the good ones--or they saddle their idea system with an unworkable and counterproductive monetary reward system that results in the opposite of what's intended. Still, companies that encourage--even demand--ideas from their employees reap many benefits. Interestingly, most of the big improvements come from very small ideas--that piggyback and replicate into a powerful snowball of change For instance, one idea from one employee might save a few thousand dollars a year in a single location, but multiply by 10,000 locations and the savings are enormous. Too, the little incremental changes are often site-specific and harder for competitors to spot, leading to long-term competitive advantage. From massive corporations like Toyota to single-locations such as a guest ranch in Arizona, companies with good idea capture systems enjoy higher morale, higher productivity, lower costs--and a fresh climate where going to work is actually fun. And after reading this book, any company ought to be able to put such a system into place.