Ideas are Free

THE IDEA REVOLUTION

What will future generations say about the way we practice management today? What will they consider our most conspicuous failure?

We believe they will accuse us of having squandered one of the most significant resources available to us: employee ideas. Every day, all over the world, millions of working people see problems and opportunities that their managers do not. With little chance to do anything about them, they are forced to watch helplessly as their organizations waste money, disappoint and lose customers, and miss opportunity after opportunity that to them are all too apparent. The result is performance far lower than it should be and employees who do not respect or trust management and who are not fully engaged with their work.

At the same time, their managers are under constant pressure to do more with less. But with so much of their time consumed by "firefighting" and trying to meet short-term demands, they have little or no time to think about how to build their organizations' capabilities. They are chronically short of the resources they need to keep performance at current levels, much less improve it. They wonder how to motivate their employees, who don't seem as involved in their work as they should be. In short, a great many managers today find their work stressful and unfulfilling. Because there seems to be no alternative, both managers and employees become jaded, and they accept the situation as the way things have to be.

But a quiet revolution is under way-an idea revolution-led by managers and supervisors who, in a small but growing number of companies, have learned how to listen systematically to their employees. With each implemented idea, performance improves in some way. Some time or money is saved, someone's job becomes a little easier, the customer experience is enhanced, or the organization is improved in some other way. With large numbers of ideas coming in, performance improves dramatically. And as employees see their ideas used, they know they are having an impact on their organization and become engaged in their work.

Why do we call this movement a revolution? We do so because it liberates people and transforms the way that organizations are run. It changes the nature of the relationship between managers and their employees. As Ray Winter, then president of BIC Corporation, observed about the effect of his company's idea system on the corporate culture:

This system has taught my managers real respect for their employees. My managers have learned that their employees can make them look awfully good, if they only let them.

This comment could easily be taken to mean that it does not take much-other than receptiveness on the part of management-to get large numbers of ideas from employees. But, just as it did the other companies we have studied, it took BIC years of experimentation and learning to discover how to tap this potential. There is a lot to learn, much of which goes against the initial assumptions most managers make about why people give ideas and which ideas are important.

WHAT'S IN AN IDEA?

Ideas are the engine of progress. They improve people's lives by creating better ways to do things. They build and grow successful organizations and keep them healthy and prosperous. Without the ability to get new ideas, an organization stagnates and declines and eventually will be eliminated by competitors who do have fresh ideas.

An idea begins when a person becomes aware of a problem or opportunity, however small. Every day, regular employees-the people who do the office work, make the products, and serve the customers-see plenty of problems and opportunities and come up with good ideas about how to address them:

When accounting for oil purchases, a staffer in a regional distribution center of Deutsche Post, the German post office, noticed that the company was paying too much for the