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 productivity and customer service, to offer new or better products or services, or to enhance their organizations in other ways. But their organizations usually 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 extraordinary 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 articulated 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 important, 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 revolution 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 transformation 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 counterparts. 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.