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Book Review

 

  

Ideas Are Free

Barrett-Koehler Publishers —2004 (232 pages in hardback)

Authors Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder

ISBN 1-57675-282-8

 

This is a book about transformation and the leadership it takes to achieve it. The obvious premise of this book is that “ideas” can transform an average company into a great one, or a struggling organization into a competitive success. The power to achieve this is in simple everyday ideas from the people who really know where the problems exist, the front line workers. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder have written a book that has its origins in the 1980’s. Schroeder had discovered that the “employees of distressed companies could often identify and solve critical problems which management had either missed or ignored”. Around the same time, Robinson was studying Japanese organizations and discovering how small ideas could lead to high employee involvement and superior performance. This book is a result of their research that led them into 150 different organizations in seventeen countries representing a diverse variety of industries.

 

Ideas Are Free is a book that discusses how everyday common-sense ideas can make a powerful difference in any organization! Most American organizational cultures constantly search for the “big” revolutionary ideas that often are quickly duplicated by the competition. But it is the ongoing benefits derived from smaller innovations that can really make a huge difference. These small ideas tend to remain proprietary within the organization that utilizes them. Sadly, most organizations seem to ignore this opportunity and are better at suppressing ideas instead of promoting them!

 

Ideas Are Free correctly focuses on the fact that the best ideas come from people who do the work and see many things the manager doesn’t. Managers are good at squandering the most significant resource that organizations possess: employee ideas. Aside from innovation, another advantage of utilizing the ideas of employees is that the process pushes the decision-making authority back down to the people who do the work where it belongs. A secondary benefit is that managers are reminded every day of how valuable and productive ideas from the “front-line” can be. This should remind the manager to be less arrogant and more humble.

 

This book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 convinces the reader that small ideas can drive a culture of high performance. It also provides an overview of the books main points. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the importance of going after small ideas, and examines why most common reward systems fail. Chapter 5 discusses how to create an effective process to deal with many new ideas, and how to make idea generation a part of everyone’s job. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on helping employees engender more and better ideas, and how to make a good idea system a truly great one. Chapter 8 shows how a sound ideas system can make a positive change in the organization’s culture. Most chapters end with suggested actions that any manager can adopt to promote ideas called “Guerrilla Tactics”.

 

Ideas Are Free is excellent reading and one that can inspire a manager to tap into any organization’s greatest untapped natural resource… it’s people!

 

 

weLEAD rating – highly recommended

 

 

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