Welcome to the Idea-Driven Organization blog. We believe there are few things with more potential for improving an organization’s performance than ideas from its front-line employees.
Every day, front-line employees see many problems and opportunities that their managers don’t. They have plenty of ideas to improve productivity and customer service, to offer new or better products and services, or to enhance their organizations in other ways. Unfortunately, most organizations do better at suppressing their ideas than promoting them.
When managers gain the ability to implement twenty, fifty or even a hundred ideas per person per year, everything changes.
Our goal here is to provide a forum for people who are interested in creating a different kind of organization – one that is driven forward every day by the creativity of all of its employees. While the concept of listening to employee ideas seems simple enough, there is a lot to know about how to set up high-performing idea processes and how to lead an idea-driven organization. Much of what needs to be done is counterintuitive, particularly to managers who have had successful careers in organizations driven from the top.
With this blog we hope to create a community interested in advancing knowledge about how to build organizations driven by bottom-up ideas. We will not only share the findings of our ongoing research, but also the stories and the lessons we learn from organizations we work with. From time-to-time, we will invite interesting management thinkers and the leaders of idea-driven organizations to contribute their thoughts as interviewees or guest bloggers. We hope that you find this blog enjoyable and insightful. Please feel free to contact us at info@idea-driven.com with questions or to offer ideas for future blog posts.
Our first post discusses a fact that surprised us when we first encountered it. Eighty percent of an organization’s potential for improvement and innovation is locked up in the ideas of its front-line people. We invite you to join us on our continuing quest to unlock this potential.