Customer Reviews

Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations

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The theme of employee suggestions is not new. But this book provides answers and strong motivation to try out again. The things that I learned from reading the book are:

1) Why rewards based on value of saving does not work.
2) A series of small ideas adds up to one Big one.
3) Even big ideas needs small ideas to get them working right.
4) Small ideas are not easily copied.
5) A properly implemented idea system improve management - employee relations
6) Successfully implemented ideas system is the key to competitive advantage and sustainable long term performance.

Please read the book for the details. Highly recommended.

Empowering employees to do the right thing is a key idea in my Principled Profit philosophy.

This principle can improve every aspect of a business, as Robinson and Schroeder demonstrate.

In an empowered organization, employee ideas--especially those from front-line workers--are a currency with the capability to slash costs, boost morale and productivity, and in some cases yield enormous actual-dollar profitability.

But too many organizations go about idea collection all wrong. Either they have no systematized method of collecting, analyzing, and acting on ideas--rapidly implementing the good ones--or they saddle their idea system with an unworkable and counterproductive monetary reward system that results in the opposite of what's intended.

Still, companies that encourage--even demand--ideas from their employees reap many benefits. Interestingly, most of the big improvements come from very small ideas--that piggyback and replicate into a powerful snowball of change For instance, one idea from one employee might save a few thousand dollars a year in a single location, but multiply by 10,000 locations and the savings are enormous. Too, the little incremental changes are often site-specific and harder for competitors to spot, leading to long-term competitive advantage.

From massive corporations like Toyota to single-locations such as a guest ranch in Arizona, companies with good idea capture systems enjoy higher morale, higher productivity, lower costs--and a fresh climate where going to work is actually fun.

And after reading this book, any company ought to be able to put such a system into place.

How did Toyota rise from being an obscure automaker to being "Number Three" in "The Big Three?" How did Toyota come to dominate the J.D. Powers Consumer Satisfaction Survey? And why is it Toyota has not laid off a single worker since 1950? Ideas. Toyota uses hundreds more ideas per worker than do its American counterparts.

While Toyota is a stunning example of how one company gets and uses employee ideas, this book isn't about Toyota. It's about liberating people and transforming organizations through ideas. Not necessarily big ideas, but ideas that come from every person in the organization and add up to big things.

The typical organization is an idea desert. This well-researched book shows you, through case histories and clear explanations, how any organization can transform that desert into a lush land that produces bumper crops.

One key is tapping into the vast resource of employees who are closest to the work. Managers have a perspective that is excellent for addressing the larger picture. But to have that perspective, managers are necessarily removed from being close to the work. Thus, they simply are not in a position to see how to improve the work.

Another important concept that many managers fail to put to use is that of massively parallel eyes, ears, and brains. Joseph Antonini taught us that ignoring these inputs is very dangerous--he nearly ruined K-Mart by assuming his ideas were the only ones that really mattered.

We have to remember that employees are often leaders and thinkers outside of work. They rear children, hold leadership positions in their churches, hold leadership positions in their trade or professional organizations, conduct neighborhood watches, pay mortgages, coach softball teams, teach children how to ride bikes, care for their aged parents, plan vacation trips, plan and prepare meals for guests, conduct hundreds of financial transactions each year, safely navigate their way around strange neighborhoods or even cities they have never been to before, conduct research at their library and online, send their spouses or children off to war and support them across vast oceans, and.... You get the point. And this is a point that Ideas Are Free brings to front and center.

Companies who treat employees as a brain trust have an enormous advantage over companies that treat employees as a cost they'd like to eliminate. This book shows you how to treat employees as a brain trust, based on what other companies have successfully done. It also alerts you to some pitfalls and explains why certain approaches don't work.

The competitive advantage that will most determine the future of any company is brainpower. It's not a matter of hiring bright people. It's a matter of correctly managing the brainpower you already have. And that's why I recommend Ideas Are Free to anyone who is in a management position.

In today's globally competitive environment, you can't afford to operate on the same premise Antonini did.

You need ideas. And, they are free--if you know how to look for them.

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!

Authors Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder articulate a plain, obvious truth that hierarchical executives and managers may sometimes ignore: often the best ideas come not from the top, but from the little guy working in the cubicle or out on the assembly line. Their book predicts an 'idea revolution,' where companies realize that their employees' ideas are among their companies' most valuable resources. The book reviews the basics of how to set up an idea-generating system, how to reward employees effectively and how to keep managerial egos out of the way. The authors discuss several case studies that demonstrate the power of a good idea. A new idea? No. One is reminded of Andre Gide, who said, "Everything has already been said, but because nobody was listening, we keep having to start all over again at the beginning." We recommend this book to any manager, executive or business owner who seeks powerful organizational improvements based on individual insight, creativity and innovation. Go ask a customer service clerk how to make things better.

I did not purchase this book, but came across it and decided to give it a look. Not bad if you are in a medium- to large-size corporate environment. It doesn't suit my exact needs but has some ideas that are worthwhile, particularly insights into behavior and rewards that suits a manufacturing environment. Some good insights particularly into motivating your work force and establishing dialogue between management and rank/file.

"I have been given the chance to upgrade my experience form this great book by in person day-long meeting with authors of this book.

Alan's and Dean's story reveals how important the "small improving ideas" are in our lives. If you meet somebody with block-buster hunger, buy him a copy of this book."

While this book is a few years old the advice it gives is priceless. It amazes me that more companies do not make use of a suggestion program. Following the recommendations the authors put forward it would be relatively easy and cost effective to introduce such a program. The book is clearly written by individuals who are well versed in the subject with a great deal of experience.

The book includes examples of successful suggestions programs implemented at various companies, the ways in which management encourages and rewards ideas, and many actual improvement suggestions ranging from the obvious & easy to the ingenious & complex. One I found to be particularly interesting was from a large nursery that had issues when it rained with the manure in the soil becoming an irritant for the workers. One such worker suggested putting a tarp over the piles of soil when it rained. This was considered a "moral boosting" suggestion, but as it turned out the wet soil was actually causing them to have almost 60% lower plant yields due to the inconsistent way the soil dried. After implementing the tarp suggestion the company saved a lot of time and money. The book also includes recommended tactics to counteract some of the cultural barriers that are often encountered when trying to begin such a program. I found the "Gorilla Tactics - actions you can take today without the boss's permission" at the end of each chapter quite intriguing.

I only have one criticism of this book; it's a bit wordy.

One of the fundamental principles in the field of psychiatry is that most humans are driven by a fear of loss rather than the perceived reward of gain, which means new opportunities and novel ideas are often avoided in favor of the status quo. Unfortunately, this construct of the human mindset is a recipe for financial decline when it's rampant within a commercial organization. In the book "Ideas Are Free," authors Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder challenge managers and executives to mine their own organizations for both small and large nuggets of knowledge. Soundview likes this book because it recommends a bottom-up, contrarian strategy to glean the best ideas and learnings from the individuals who have the best understanding of the respective business - namely the front-line employees rather than executives. The book also showcases the best-of-breed idea generation tactics from more than 300 companies across dozens of industries to help the reader see how it's done. Simply put, too many companies look outside the organization for the next big idea, when a little introspection might go a long way toward producing significant results.

This book was recommended to me by several people at a recent ESOP conference. Feeling that employee input was one of the best ways to build an ownership culture, I purchased the book. I was only 3/4 of the way through it when I found that we had another employee working on an ideas program, planning to give 10% of savings as employee bonuses. I quickly passed the book on to him. As it did with me, it totally changed his way of thinking; he scrapped his initial plan and will be proposing a completely different program that rewards all employees who submit ideas, without the reward being based on the savings.

In "Ideas are Free," the authors synopsize idea programs at several high-performing companies worldwide. They also point out the pitfalls of trying to develop and manage rewards based on savings, instead recommending making idea generation and implementation a part of everyone's job. Finally, they help walk you through how to implement a program at your workplace (although I haven't been able to read that part yet, because my co-worker still has my book! -- He has ordered his own, so I hope to have it back soon.).

I highly recommend this book. It is non-technical and easy to read.