Dean M. Schroeder

This book is a comprehensive guide to an exciting new approach that managers at any level can use to transform their corners of government. Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of seventy-seven government organizations--ranging from small departments to entire states--Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don't work well in the public sector, while practices that are rare in the private sector prove highly effective. The highest performers they studied had attained levels of efficiency that rivaled the best private-sector companies. Rather than management making the improvements, as is the norm in the private sector, these high-performers focused on front-line-driven improvement, where most of the change activity was led by supervisors and low-level managers who unleashed the creativity and ideas of their employees to improve their operations bit by bit every day. You'll discover how Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses reduced wait times from an hour and forty minutes to just seven minutes; how the Washington State Patrol garage tripled its productivity and became a national benchmark; how a K-8 school in New Brunswick, Canada, boosted the percentage of students reading at the appropriate age level from 22 percent to 78 percent; and much more.

Because they're doing the day-to-day work, front-line employees see many problems and opportunities their managers don't. But most organizations fail to realize this potentially extraordinary source of revenue-enhancing ideas.The authors of Ideas Are Free use real-world examples from their work with hundreds of organizations to show how to exploit the virtually free, perpetually renewable resource of employee ideas. The book explains how sustainable competitive advantages in areas ranging from productivity and responsiveness to cost reduction and quality assurance are only possible with the attention to detail that comes from getting and implementing large numbers of ideas from employees.Subjects include how to make ideas part of everyone's job, how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas, how to help people come up with more and better ideas, and how a strong flow of ideas can have a profound impact on an organization's culture.

Most companies, if they solicit employee ideas at all, essentially just set up a suggestion box, which employees know from experience is where ideas go to die. So nothing happens. But innovation is not an option - it's the key to survival. And innovation needs new ideas. So where are those ideas going to come from? Using numerous examples, Robinson and Schroeder argue that the employees who interact directly with your customers, make your products, and provide your services are in the best position to see where problems exist and what improvements and new offerings would have the most impact. Robinson and Schroeder explain how leaders can build the kind of idea - driven company capable of implementing fifty to a hundred or more ideas per employee per year. Drawing on their work with companies worldwide, they show what's needed to put together a management team open to grassroots innovation and describe the strategies, policies, and practices that encourage - and those that discourage - employee ideas. They detail exactly how high - performing idea processes work and how to design one customized for your organization - including advice for teaching people how to come up with new ideas. The best ideas may come from the bottom, but they have to be systematically solicited from the top.