ABOUT IDEAS ARE FREE

What People are Saying | Table of Contents | Excerpts

A worker in one of Europe's largest wireless communication companies stumbled across an error in his company's billing software that was costing some $26 million per year in lost revenues. He pointed out a simple way to fix it. A secretary at Grapevine Canyon Ranch realized that, when potential customers searched on the Internet for guest ranches in the southwestern United States, the major search engines were returning her company's website well down the list. She proposed a simple change that made it appear at the top. A prison guard at the Massachusetts Department of Correction sent in an idea to use digital cameras instead of film cameras to process new inmates. Across the department's sixteen correctional facilities, his suggestion saved $56,000 per year.

Ideas Are Free shows managers how to radically improve the performance of their organizations by tapping the huge potential latent in their employees' ideas.

Ideas are the engine of progress. Without them, organizations stagnate and decline. Yet most organizations are far more effective at suppressing employee ideas than promoting them. Every day, millions of workers around the world see problems and opportunities their bosses flat-out miss. With little chance to do anything about them, they are forced to watch as their companies waste time and money, disappoint and lose customers, and perform far below their potential.

In today's fiercely competitive business environment, managers can no longer afford to disregard the substantial advantages that employee ideas provide. But many managers either don't appreciate the power of these ideas, or they have never learned how to encourage and deal with them effectively. With know-how, it is relatively simple. The problem is that much of what managers instinctively want to do is highly counter-productive. Through their extensive research and work with more than 300 companies in 17 different countries Robinson and Schroeder have discovered the key principles for getting and managing large numbers of high-quality worker ideas. In Ideas Are Free, they provide a roadmap and practical toolkit for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way managers work and their organizations are structured.

Ideas Are Free is full of enlightening examples - from a wide range of industry, government and non-profit organizations - of how managers have gone about achieving exceptional performance through worker ideas. Each chapter ends with guerrilla tactics, actions managers at any level of an organization can take today, without the boss's permission, that will result in many performance-enhancing ideas.

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