Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations: Easyread Large Bold Edition - Softcover

Robinson, Alan G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442962313 ISBN 13: 9781442962316

Publisher: Readhowyouwant, 2009

Synopsis

Performance expectations for managers keep going up. Managers are continually asked to do more, but to do it with less. For top management, the standard response to flagging profits and increasing competition has become budget cuts and layoffs. Middle managers and supervisors suffer the consequences, as they are left with too few resources and people to do the work. They are forced to operate in survival mode, putting in long hours to deal with an endless stream of urgent problems. Almost never do they have the time to think beyond this month's results. In addition, they are under constant scrutiny, and their jobs are not secure. Ironically, help is closer than they realize - in the people who work for them. They are the ones who do the work, and they see many things their managers don't. On a daily basis, they see what is frustrating customers, causing waste, or generally holding the organization back. Employees often know how to improve performance and reduce costs more intelligently than their bosses do. Yet they are rarely given a chance to do anything about it. No one asks them for their ideas. Over the last century, many managers have recognized the huge potential in employee ideas and tried to tap it. But few have been truly successful. Those few found that they had fundamentally changed their organizations and helped them reach extraordinary levels of performance. Today, most managers either don't realize the full power of employee ideas or have never learned how to deal with them effectively. That is why we wrote Ideas Are Free.We hope that you enjoy Ideas Are Free and that it makes you a better leader. ----Preface

About this title

About the Author

Alan G. Robinson is an award-winning author, an educator, and a consultant. He is co-author of Corporate Creativity, which was a finalist for the Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Best Business Book Award, and was named ''Book of the Year'' by the Academy of Human Resource Management. He has a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and a B.A./M.A. from the University of Cambridge. He teaches at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Robinson has advised more than a hundred companies and government agencies in eleven countries.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 a tremendous resource by not listening to the ideas of front-line employees – the people performing the day-to-day tasks that keep their organizations functioning. Every day, all over the world, millions of working people see problems and opportunities that their managers don’t. 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 intangible costs of the way we treat front-line employees are even greater. Who can put a price on how much a dysfunctional culture detracts from an organization’s performance and the quality of the lives of the people who work there?

But a quiet revolution is underway – an idea revolution – led by managers and supervisors who, in a small but growing number of companies, are getting extraordinary numbers of useful ideas from their people. This book is about how these quiet revolutionaries do it, and how inspired supervisors and managers at any level in any organization can do the same.

Why do we call this movement a revolution? We do so because its intent is to liberate employees from top to bottom, and to transform the way that organizations are run. For managers, revolutionary stirrings begin with the realization that employee ideas can have a huge impact on the performance of their units, and free them from time-consuming "fire-fighting". They can then focus on what they should be focusing on. For employees, management’s responsiveness to their ideas gives them a real chance to address many of the problems and opportunities they see on a daily basis, and to have a personal impact on the performance of their organizations. They become committed revolutionaries too. And everyone’s work becomes much more rewarding and less stressful.

The idea revolution changes the nature of the relationship between managers and their employees. As Ray Winter, President of BIC North America 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 doesn’t take much – other than receptiveness on the part of management – to get large numbers of ideas from employees. But it took BIC years of experimentation and learning to discover how to tap this potential, just as it did the other companies we discuss in this book. There is a lot to learn, much of which is counterintuitive. Managers often have to reverse their assumptions about why people give in ideas, and which ones are really important.

Very little has been published on how organizations can set about getting large numbers of ideas from their front-line employees. Ideas Are Free was written to fill this void. The concepts and advice in it are based on our own firsthand research in hundreds of organizations around the world, and we have tested and refined them in well over a hundred more. These range in size from small family businesses to large multinational organizations. They operate in many different cultures and countries, and represent diverse sectors of the economy, including financial services, retailing, health care, manufacturing, hospitality, agriculture, publishing, high-technology, transportation and logistics, telecommunications, not-for-profit and government. While we have studied or worked with organizations that were already leading the world in managing employee ideas, we have also conducted research in, and helped many more whose initiatives had not been so successful. Being able to contrast the excellent performers with the mediocre and poor, across such a diverse set of businesses and situations, has allowed us to develop a good understanding of the principles involved in managing ideas.

About this edition

• Publisher: Readhowyouwant
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1442962313
• ISBN 13: 9781442962316
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308