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CHAPTER 8
LIBERATION AND TRANSFORMATION

In 1892, National Cash Register had a large shipment of defective cash registers returned from Great Britain. When the company’s CEO, John Patterson, investigated the source of the defects, he was shocked to discover that the registers had been sabotaged by his own employees. He realized that their morale was extremely low, because of how poorly they were treated. He immediately set about turning the situation around. Among other things, he started up a suggestion box system, the first in the United States. Because of his prominence in the business world at the time and the forcefulness with which he advocated the benefits of employee ideas, the suggestion box became a popular management tool in the first half of the twentieth century.198

Like Patterson, many early business leaders saw the suggestion box as a tool to counteract a problem that concerned them deeply. As their organizations grew in size, they became increasingly impersonal, and employees found it harder to feel ownership in their work. Forward-thinking managers saw the problems this disengagement created. The prevailing view at the time was that the benefit of a suggestion box lay not in the ideas themselves, but in reengaging employees with their work. When the National Association of Suggestion Systems was founded in 1942, its primary goal was “to improve employer-employee relations.”¹ Only later would it change its name to the Employee Involvement Association.

Today, a great many organizations still struggle with poor cultures. Although most managers would agree that a dysfunctional culture results in lower performance, elements of culture such as trust, respect, commitment, and involvement are difficult things to manage. Because of this, many managers who have attempted to improve their organizations’ cultures have met with disappointing or ambiguous results.

But organizations with effective idea systems have learned that there is a strong link between culture and the flow of employee ideas. This is why an idea system—whose performance can be measured and managed—provides such an effective way to improve corporate culture. In this chapter, we tell the stories of organizations that discovered the connection between culture and ideas, and used this discovery to break into much higher levels of performance.

IDEAS AND ATTITUDES

In chapter 2, we described how the idea system at Grapevine Canyon Ranch created a considerable competitive advantage for it. But this was not the reason that CEO Eve Searle started her idea initiative in 1993. At the time, she was merely looking for a way to change her employees’ negative attitudes toward their work.199

One day, an ad for a seminar put on by Boardroom Inc. caught her eye. The seminar was about the company’s idea system, and among other things the ad claimed that listening to ideas from employees would change the way they felt toward the company. Intrigued, Searle decided to attend. She came away with the message that a good idea system might indeed improve her employees’ attitudes. This rang particularly true to her. As a young woman, Searle had worked in a number of companies where she had proposed better ways to do things, only to have her bosses rebuff her. And she had always remembered how that felt.

When she got back, she started regular idea meetings with a small group of employees whom she thought would like to offer ideas. The group met every two weeks, and each person was asked to bring two ideas to every meeting. Sometimes Searle asked for ideas on a particular theme, such as how to cut costs, how to improve efficiency, or how to enhance guest services. As ideas began to get implemented, other employees asked to participate in the meetings too. Over time, Searle was able to make the meetings a company-wide activity. By 1996, idea meetings were a fixture at Grapevine Canyon. Every two weeks on payday, she ended up with ten to fifteen good ideas.

Searle never imagined the depth and extent of the change her idea system would bring about. She hoped for some improvement in morale but not the “total turnaround” (as she put it) that ultimately transpired. Her customer satisfaction ratings soared. Not only did employees become genuinely concerned about looking after the guests, but their ideas included a myriad of nice touches that made life easier and smoother for everyone—including themselves. What was totally unexpected, however, was the effect of her new idea system on the horses.

In 1992, a number of the ranch’s horses had suffered bouts of colic (irritated bowels). The national average for a stable of horses is roughly one case of colic per year for every hundred horses. When, within a two-month period, two of her seventy horses died of colic, and seven others came down with it, Searle knew she had a problem. Colic causes discomfort to humans, but for horses (who have some three hundred feet of intestines) it can be life-threatening. Colic can be caused by a food obstruction, worms, or general poor health. In an otherwise healthy horse, it can be caused by stress.

To Searle’s surprise, from 1993 (when Grapevine started its idea system) to 1998, there were no further cases of colic at the ranch, a rate far below the national average. During a short period in 1998, after a new wrangler with some personal problems was hired, there were four cases of colic. But once that wrangler left, there were no further cases. What Searle discovered was that horses are extremely sensitive to negative attitudes in their handlers. In fact, they react physically. When Searle started her idea process, she certainly did not expect the resulting cultural transformation to lower her veterinarian bills substantially.201

As Searle put it, a good idea program turns “them” and “us” into “we.” The increased interest of her employees in their work, together with their improvement ideas, translated into a more productive and enjoyable work environment for everyone—guests, employees, managers, and even the horses.

IDEAS AND RESPECT, TRUST, AND INVOLVEMENT

In 1991, Ray Winter took over as president and chief operating officer of BIC Corporation. During his introductory meeting with the employees, it became obvious to him that he had a problem. As he put it, “It’s very difficult to speak to 650 people knowing that they don’t believe a word you say, and who think that your job is to eliminate their jobs.” BIC had recently opened several new plants in the Carolinas to produce roller pens. The workers at the Milford, Connecticut, facility (company headquarters and the base of most of its production) were convinced the move was the first step in transferring production to right-to-work states to break the union. Rumors were also in the air that the company was considering relocating much of its manufacturing to Mexico. Employee-management relations could hardly have been worse. Several employees told us that during those times they would not have risked speaking to their supervisors without a union steward present. Winter saw immediately that the poor employee-management relations were the predominant reason for the organization’s high costs and were what was keeping it from improving. He promptly made it his highest priority to turn the situation around.202

One of his initiatives was to encourage each of the eight largely autonomous profit centers in the company to develop a strategy to increase employee involvement. But after a year or so, it became clear that things hadn’t changed much. The reason was that the term employee involvement had never been clearly defined. As Winter put it, when two people passed each other in the hallway and waved, this was deemed to show employee involvement. This vagueness left the company with no real way to track and improve how it was doing in regard to the president’s top priority. Essentially, his managers were navigating blind.

But the Ink Systems Unit was a different story. When asked to work on employee involvement, its director Dick Williams had asked a group of union workers to help develop their unit’s approach. One of the things this group pointed out was that they and their colleagues had a lot of ideas on how to make the operation run better but kept these ideas to themselves, because they didn’t believe the company would listen to them. With Williams’s encouragement, the group set up a process for soliciting and handling ideas, and they asked Charlie Tichy, a union worker and outspoken critic of many management practices, to run it. It was an enlightened choice. If a hardened union workforce was going to be convinced that the company was ready to take their ideas seriously, who better to convince them than one of their own?

In short order, the program became very successful. The 130 hourly employees in the Ink Systems Unit submitted some 300 ideas in the first three months, and some 1,200 ideas in the first year, an average of more than nine per person.203

The Ink Systems Unit’s success with its idea system showed Winter the connection between the number of ideas his employees were offering and the level of their involvement. If the employees submitted lots of ideas, they were clearly involved. Conversely, if they were involved, they would submit ideas. In short, employee ideas provided a way to manage involvement. Finally, BIC had something it could measure and improve. Why not, Winter asked, simply define the “employee involvement” program to be the idea system?

From that moment, things gelled quickly. Dick Williams was promoted to vice president of manufacturing, and the idea system was implemented company-wide as a joint labor-management initiative. Tichy served as one of the two co-coordinators of the program, and Philip Preston, a veteran union worker recently promoted to management, as the other. In 2002, the company received some three ideas per employee. The performance improvement and cost savings from the system have been significant, and labor-management relations are greatly improved. The idea system served its purpose of getting employees more involved and increasing their trust in managers. By doing so, it removed a barrier to progress.

Winter observed that the idea initiative also taught his managers respect for their employees. Managers learned that their employees could make them look very good, if only they let them.204

IDEAS AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Remember DUBAL, the highly successful aluminum company in Dubai? When its CEO John Boardman said, “Our idea system is our competitive advantage,” he was referring to much more than the ideas directly related to business operations.

Dubai is a very international community. Some 80 percent of DUBAL’s 2,700 employees come from abroad. In 2002, its workforce was composed of nationals of forty-three countries. At DUBAL this diverse labor force has learned to work together—and work together well.

The idea system proved an invaluable instrument for creating harmony and making the company more welcoming to people with substantial differences in their cultural and religious backgrounds. Because most of its employees live in company housing, DUBAL encourages ideas that address lifestyle needs. For example, Sikh employees suggested that a place be provided for them to worship, observing that the company already had a church, a mosque, and a Hindu temple. So a small Sikh temple was built. When Filipino workers pointed out that the cable channels the company provided didn’t include one of the most popular ones in their country, that channel was added. And many suggestions have come in—and been responded to—about what kinds of foods to provide and how to prepare them.205

In similar companies around the Persian Gulf, the typical foreign worker might stay with a company for three to five years. DUBAL has an incredible 3 percent turnover rate, and many of its expatriate employees have been with the company for more than twenty years.

All kinds of synergies accrue to DUBAL because of the “harmony” resulting from its smooth-running idea system. Because its workforce is stable, the resources invested in training have more impact. DUBAL has a substantial training budget, averaging several thousand dollars per employee per year. Without the need to train many new employees, this budget goes mostly into deepening the skills of the existing workforce. Because of this, over time the skill level of the workforce has increased dramatically.

HOW IDEAS COUNTER LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

Ed Schultz, former CEO of Dana Commercial Credit (now part of Dana’s leasing operation), always paid keen attention to the culture in his organization. He told us that he had been sensitized to the importance of culture as a small child:

This comment reveals how helpless Schultz’s father felt because his ideas weren’t listened to. He dealt with this by poking fun at management and emotionally distancing himself from the company. His was a case of what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” When people are constantly beaten down and reminded on a daily basis that they aren’t supposed to think, sooner or later they stop showing any initiative. Conversely, when employees’ ideas are encouraged and used, their energy, commitment, and initiative increase. Consider the following example.

Mark, a student in one of our classes, worked weekend nights at a five-star hotel in Chicago. His job was to close accounts and prepare guest bills for the following day. The overnight crew was largely leaderless—if problems developed, the employees on duty were expected to solve them themselves. One Saturday night, about 10:30, the entire Detroit Lions football team arrived for a game the next day with the Chicago Bears. The team was ravenous, and as soon as they checked into their rooms, they all ordered room service. The night shift in the kitchen was completely overwhelmed.

One guest, who was not a member of the football team and who was staying in one of the $700-per-night luxury suites, called the front desk to complain that he had ordered room service ninety minutes earlier and still didn’t have his food. Mark went down to the kitchen, found the guest’s order in the chaos, expedited it, and personally took it up to the luxury suite. When the guest answered the door, Mark wheeled the service table in and turned to face the disgruntled guest. Addressing him by name, he explained what had happened and said, “This type of service is totally unsatisfactory for our hotel. We cannot in good conscience charge you for your stay tonight.” He gave the guest this complementary stay on his own authority.

In the morning, Mark’s supervisor came in. As usual, Mark reported on the night’s activities, including how he had waived all charges for the guest in the luxury suite. Rather than being upset, his manager complimented Mark for his actions and suggested that Mark lead a team to identify how similar problems could be avoided in the future. What is more, the next day, the customer called, complimented the manager on Mark’s quick action, and reserved the luxury suite for a ten-day stay the following month.

It is worth noting that Mark could just as easily have chosen to duck the problem with the guest in the luxury suite and passed him on to room service. His boss could not have criticized Mark for not exercising initiative, nor would the frustrated guest have really blamed him in any way. After all, it was management that failed to foresee the room service bottleneck.

Managers cannot foretell the future. Employee initiative is often critical. In the normal course of things, by the time Mark’s manager would have learned of the service failure, it would have been too late. But Mark’s quick action made the hotel and his manager look good. And when Mark’s courage and initiative were appreciated, he became a more confident person, and so a more valuable employee.208

For a manager, the difference between looking stupid or looking brilliant can be as simple as being open to a subordinate’s perspectives and ideas. In other words, a good idea system is a potent antidote to the kind of culture that Scott Adams pokes fun at in his Dilbert cartoons. As Schultz put it, when talking about his father’s experience:

IDEAS AND A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE

Throughout this book, we have tried to show how employee ideas help managers improve both performance and the cultures of their organizations. In this final section, we recount the journeys of two organizations: Milliken & Company and Good Shepherd Services—one a major global corporation, and the other a modest not-for-profit health care organization. Both are in intensely competitive industries. In the beginning, both had leaders who faced difficult situations and took bold steps to change the way their organizations worked. And in both cases, employee ideas were key to the transformations that put them solidly out in front of their competitors.209

The story of Milliken’s idea initiative began in 1980, as the company was moving into a wrenching downturn. The textile industry has always been cyclical, and Milliken, like its competitors, was accustomed to ups and downs. Business in 1978 and 1979 had been good, but toward the end of 1979, orders began to drop off. Management knew a downturn was coming but was concerned that this one might be devastating. Dramatically increased foreign competition promised to force more severe price cutting than usual and make orders more difficult to attract. By the end of 1979, it was clear that the industry was in a full recession.

Every year, Roger Milliken, the sixty-five-year-old company patriarch, spent two weeks at the end of the year with his family in Vail, Colorado. While he did do a little skiing, he spent most of his time reading the latest business books. The management team had grown accustomed to Milliken coming back full of enthusiasm about some new management idea he had read about on his holiday. The year 1980 was no different. This time, he was excited about Philip Crosby’s new book Quality Is Free.

Milliken was impressed by Crosby’s assertion that even if a company was well managed, 22 to 28 percent of what it did was waste. In the very best ones, the figure was between 18 and 22 percent. “Even if our waste is currently only 10 percent,” Milliken told his managers, “reducing it further is the best opportunity we have to work on.”

Crosby’s approach was a completely different way to manage quality than the one that Milliken & Company had been using. “It involves teams and all kinds of things to help people identify problems,” Milliken explained to his management team. “It sounds exactly like what we’ve been hearing that the Japanese are doing to attack our automobile industry. Don’t you think we ought to do this?”

Tom Malone, a vice president on the senior management team, wondered whether the others were thinking what he was: “Mr. Milliken has read another book. What changes will this one lead to?” He was certainly not prepared for what Roger Milliken proposed next.210

“I tell you what. Let’s get Crosby up here today. It says in the book that he lives in Winter Park, Florida. John [Rampey, vice president of education], call him up, tell him we are going to send a plane down to bring him up this afternoon, and talk about this.” No one dared to remind Milliken that it was Sunday.

Half an hour later, Rampey came back.

“What did he say?” Milliken asked.

“He doesn’t work on Sundays.” The management team exchanged glances. Wow. Who was this guy, to talk to Roger Milliken like that?

“Well, go back and tell him we’ll send a plane down in the morning for him.”

A little while later, Rampey came back. “He won’t come. He’s not free. But if we send a plane down tomorrow, his company’s president will come and give us an hour’s presentation.”

And that is what happened. After the presentation, Roger Milliken was even more enthusiastic. But Crosby was so swamped that it would be another two months before he could visit the company to give a seminar for its top one hundred managers.

Crosby’s seminar was stimulating and inspirational, but his most significant contribution came during a private talk with Milliken. “If you implement this program,” he said, “it will represent a radical change in the way you manage and lead people. And you can’t lead it by yourself, because you have been managing the company in the same way for forty years.211

“The only way you can change your culture,” Crosby continued, “is to find a horse in your organization and challenge him to pull the company forward by leading the transformation in his area. Your job is to put scorecards in place. Create one for everyone on your management team, make sure you review them every four weeks in your policy committee meetings, and let your horse do his work. Let everyone see the results. You are going to have to manage the process, because otherwise your managers will gang up on your horse and kill him, and kill you with him. And then nothing will change in your company.”

Sometime later, Roger Milliken asked Malone to take a walk on the headquarters grounds. Milliken told him of his conversation with Crosby and then said, “Maybe you will be my horse.” Nothing more was said on the topic by either man for the rest of the walk.

But Malone was shaken and more than a little concerned. What exactly did Milliken expect of him? The other members of the policy committee had been with the company at least fifteen years longer than he. He was the new kid on the block. Now he was being set up to lead radical change and be an example for the whole company! That night, he told us, he did a lot of thinking.

In the morning, Malone called Milliken and asked him whether he was serious about turning around the way the company was managed and about him leading the initiative. Milliken told him he was. Malone made two requests.212

First, he asked for a free hand. He would, of course, keep Milliken informed, but he needed the authority to make major changes on his own. Second, he asked Milliken not to come to any of his divisional meetings for a year or to send any of his staff. (Milliken had an eighteen-person support staff who reported directly to him and were known throughout the company as his eyes and ears.) “The reason is that we are talking about a fundamental change in the way we lead our company. If you, or any of your people, are in the room, everyone will be watching you or them, not me. I will be simply a young kid who may not have a job in a year. With every decision, my people will be looking to see whether you or your staffer have your heads down or your eyes lowered. This would undermine our efforts to create real change.”

Milliken thought for a moment. “What about a year from now?”

Malone replied, “I hope by then that our changes will have brought such good results that the entire company will want to come and see what we have done.”

Over the next year, Malone’s division underwent a dramatic transformation in the way it was managed. To showcase the new empowered work environment, Malone initiated quarterly “sharing rallies,” in which small teams could present the improvements they had made in areas such as quality, cost, delivery, and safety. He also established an idea system, known as the OFI (Opportunity for Improvement) system. The OFI concept originated from one of Crosby’s fourteen steps—Error Cause Removal (ECR). For a while, Malone’s division had struggled with how to implement the ECR philosophy. The OFI system came from a plant manager in the automotive division, Wayne Punch. He had become interested in how to involve associates (Milliken’s term for employees) in the ECR process and decided to implement an idea process in his facility. To make it clear that he was serious, he put in place a “24/72” policy—every idea would be acknowledged within twenty-four hours and responded to within seventy-two hours.213

As Punch explained it to us, the ideas came “pouring in,” and his management team quickly realized that the process wasn’t organized well enough to follow through with them as fast as his policy promised. So he and his management team asked the associates for help with implementation and advice on how to improve the process. Gradually the OFI system emerged. Once the process was working well, as Punch put it, “The motivation and morale of my people was just phenomenal. I became very excited to go into work because I had people who were smiling and excited about what they were doing.”

Punch’s plant produced such outstanding results that Malone adopted the OFI concept for his entire division and integrated it into the sharing rallies. Punch was later invited to teach the OFI process in the company’s Pursuit of Excellence training classes, taken by managers from throughout the company. When Roger Milliken attended one of these classes, he liked what he saw, and soon the OFI process was adopted company-wide. As Punch commented to us, “I think of the OFI system as a recipe for becoming world-class in anything.”

In the end, Roger Milliken and Tom Malone successfully led the company on the journey of total cultural change that Crosby had envisioned. Today, Milliken & Company has one of the best idea systems in the world. It is also one of only two companies ever to have won both the United States’ Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award.

A similar transformation took place at Good Shepherd Services. When Mary Ann Kehoe took over as managing director in 1991, the nursing home was in bad shape. Morale was extremely low, employee turnover was over 100 percent per year, and the organization was in financial trouble. In the eleven years since fourteen churches in the Seymour, Wisconsin, area had founded the not-for-profit organization, it had had ten different managing directors. When Kehoe took over, everyone wondered how long she would last.214

Long-term care is a tough industry with a bad reputation. Because patients are often helpless, they can be easily exploited. Consequently, nursing homes operate under intense scrutiny by federal and state regulatory agencies and are subject to strict rules. In addition, the government Medicare payments that nursing homes depend on have not kept pace with rising costs, so money is often tight. Pay is low, especially for front-line workers, and turnover is high. Many nursing homes are forced to operate understaffed or to rely on temporary workers. For the people providing the direct care, the work can be quite unpleasant—much of their time is spent cleaning up after episodes of incontinence and dealing with patients with dementia.

Good Shepherd had been established to provide high-quality long-term care for the local community. Kehoe realized that unless Good Shepherd changed the way it operated it certainly could not fulfill this mission and might not even survive. She thought the answer lay in greater efficiency.

One of the industry’s most serious problems is the wasteful way it delivers care. As an experienced nurse, she had seen much of this waste herself and knew that improved work practices would make people’s jobs easier, save money, and enhance patient care. She also knew that many of the ideas on how to improve care would have to come from front-line staff, because they were the ones dealing with the residents. The problem was that the rules-driven hierarchical culture common in the long-term care field gave those on the front lines little chance to be heard. Kehoe also realized that simply asking front-line staff for their ideas wasn’t going to be enough. If Good Shepherd was to apply best practices throughout its operations, direct-care staff needed more knowledge about the state of the art in long-term care. Then they could apply this knowledge, through the ideas they came up with, to improve the day-to-day care of individual residents. This was the genesis of Good Shepherd’s idea activators discussed in the last chapter.

As the care staff gained experience working with ideas, they began to identify impediments to efficient decision making and implementation. They approached management with suggestions on how to improve the situation. Over several years, the leadership team made a number of crucial modifications to the way the organization worked. One, for example, ended the traditional practice of continually rotating staff between the facility’s four wings (a wing has about twenty-four residents) and the different shifts. A series of suggestions had made it clear that this practice detracted from the staff’s ability to come up with, agree on, and implement improvements. Not only did they work with different people every day, but they were not with individual residents long enough to get to know them well.

So Good Shepherd created permanent care teams, one for each shift in each wing. The teams consisted of nurses, certified nurse’s aides (CNAs), dietary aides, and housekeeping staff. The stable team membership allowed employees to get to know the residents better, learn their individual needs and personalities, focus ideas on improving each one’s quality of life, and work together to develop and implement these ideas. Of all the idea systems we have come across, the one at Good Shepherd is the most integrated into the daily routine—so integrated, in fact, that it has almost disappeared. In other words, ideas are not merely central to the job at Good Shepherd, they are an indistinguishable part of the work.216

This modest, community-based nursing home has come to have one of the best performance records in the United States. Although Good Shepherd takes residents who are in significantly worse shape than the nursing home average (as measured by state and federal acuity levels), it consistently outperforms industry averages on every major quality-of-life indicator, including incontinence, mobility, pressure ulcers, and social well-being. At Good Shepherd we found a warm, friendly, and welcoming environment. Members of the staff were professional and attentive, and they always had time for the residents. The residents were active and engaged and seemed to enjoy being there. Quite simply, we have never seen a better nursing home.

At the time of this writing, Good Shepherd had not been cited for a single deficiency by state or federal inspectors in over eight years. As far as we know, this perfect record is unmatched in the industry. The average nursing home gets eight deficiency citations per year. Employee retention at Good Shepherd is better than 90 percent, and there is a waiting list of people who want to work there. Employees who do leave—for higher wages or more convenient working hours—often return because they prefer the work environment at Good Shepherd.

Perhaps the best way to sum up where employee ideas have taken Good Shepherd is through a comment made by William L. Minnix, president and CEO of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA), the primary advocacy group for long-term care. As he said to Tommy Thompson, U.S. secretary of health and human services: “Mr. Secretary, I have seen the answer to our problems with good long-term care. It is in Seymour, Wisconsin.”217

PARTING THOUGHTS

The Good Shepherd and Milliken stories illustrate why we use the term revolution to communicate what we saw happening wherever managers were seriously seeking and acting on employee ideas. Not only were they achieving results they had not thought possible, but they were doing it with fewer resources. They were running fundamentally different organizations.

And that is why we believe that future generations will look back on the way we treat our people and be puzzled by the enormous human potential we waste, and how much that waste is costing us. Organizations like Milliken and Good Shepherd are the ones that will survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive world. Those that ignore their most valuable resource will not. Like the CEO of the AAHSA, we believe we have seen the future of management.

Our parting thought to the reader is this: Knowing how to promote employee ideas will become a critical core competency for managers—and will become so soon. Mastery of this competency will separate effective managers from ineffective ones. If, after reading this book, you share our belief, embrace the subject. Do the same thing you do to sharpen your other professional skills. Keep up-to-date with the latest thinking and practice. Read, attend conferences and seminars, and network with like-minded people inside and outside your organization. Visit organizations that successfully promote ideas (you may find them in some surprising places). But, most important, start asking your people for ideas. Remember, ideas are free, and they have the power to liberate your people and transform your organization.218

KEY POINTS

• Most organizations struggle with dysfunctional cultures, and most managers would agree that a dysfunctional culture results in lower performance. The problem is that elements of culture such as trust, respect, commitment, and involvement are difficult things to measure and manage.
• Many of the best idea systems began with the aim of improving some aspect of the corporate culture.
• Organizations with good idea systems have learned that there is a strong link between culture and the flow of employee ideas. This is why an idea system, whose performance can be measured and managed, provides such an effective way to improve corporate culture.
• Knowing how to promote employee ideas will become a critical core competency for managers. Mastery of this competency will separate effective managers from ineffective ones.
• Join the Idea Revolution. Ask your people for their ideas.