In their much-anticipated sequel to the bestseller Ideas Are Free (over 50,000 copies sold), Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder explain that employee ideas are no longer a "nice-to-have" but rather the very lifeblood of competitiveness, culture, and strategy. Their new book shows how to align every part of the organization around generating and implementing ideas at the front line.
The fact is, because they're the ones actually doing the day-to-day work front-line employees see a great many problems and opportunities that their managers don't. But most organizations do very poorly at tapping into this extraordinary potential source of revenue-enhancing, savings-generating ideas. Ideas Are Free sets out a roadmap for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way companies are structured and operate. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder draw on their ten years experience with more than three hundred organizations in fifteen countries to show precisely how to design a system to take advantage of this virtually free, perpetually renewing font of innovation. Robinson and Schroeder deal with two fundamental principles of managing ideas that are highly counterintuitive - the importance of going after small ideas rather than big ones, and the problems with the most common reward schemes and how to avoid them. They describe how to make ideas part of everyone's job, and how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas-how to take a good idea system and make it great. And they show how good idea systems have a profound impact on an organization's culture. At the end of each chapter they provide "Guerrilla Tactics for the Idea Revolutionary", actions to promote ideas that any manager can take on his or her own authority, and that require little or no resources.
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 K8 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.
In this fascinating biography, Alan L. Gansberg reveals the man behind the public face, his many memorable roles among more than 100 films, and his struggle to find steady work in Hollywood again.
Alan Robinson is a living, breathing, running miracle. In fact some might say he shouldn't even be alive today, let alone running marathons. He admits that for a good portion of his life he drank too much, hung out with the wrong crowd and used drugs. He was a former gang banger and ex-con with no real future ahead of him and he was going nowhere fast. That all changed in 1990 when an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. Despite the negative prognosis, he underwent aggressive rehabilitation and kept a positive outlook. Not only did he learn to walk again but now Alan Robinson is running marathons! He credits his miraculous recovery to the fantastic team of doctors and therapist who worked diligently with him. But far more that that he sees his recovery as a gift from God. Herein is his story of recovery, redemption and life that we can all learn from. God is good all the time and Alan Robinson is one of the best ever examples of that.
Performance expectations for managers keep going up. Managers are continually asked to do more, but to do it with less. For top management, the standard response to flagging profits and increasing competition has become budget cuts and layoffs. Middle managers and supervisors suffer the consequences, as they are left with too few resources and people to do the work. They are forced to operate in survival mode, putting in long hours to deal with an endless stream of urgent problems. Almost never do they have the time to think beyond this month's results. In addition, they are under constant scrutiny, and their jobs are not secure. Ironically, help is closer than they realize in the people who work for them. They are the ones who do the work, and they see many things their managers don't. On a daily basis, they see what is frustrating customers, causing waste, or generally holding the organization back. Employees often know how to improve performance and reduce costs more intelligently than their bosses do. Yet they are rarely given a chance to do anything about it. No one asks them for their ideas. Over the last century, many managers have recognized the huge potential in employee ideas and tried to tap it. But few have been truly successful. Those few found that they had fundamentally changed their organizations and helped them reach extraordinary levels of performance. Today, most managers either don't realize the full power of employee ideas or have never learned how to deal with them effectively. That is why we wrote Ideas Are Free....We hope that you enjoy Ideas Are Free and that it makes you a better leader.
In this fascinating biography, Alan L. Gansberg reveals the man behind the public face, his many memorable roles among more than 100 films, and his struggle to find steady work in Hollywood again.
Since the last edition of this definitive textbook was published in 2013, much has happened in the field of animal behavior. In this fourth edition, Lee Alan Dugatkin draws on cutting-edge new work not only to update and expand on the studies presented, but also to reinforce the previous editions’ focus on ultimate and proximate causation, as well as the book’s unique emphasis on natural selection, learning, and cultural transmission. The result is a state-of-the-art textbook on animal behavior that explains underlying concepts in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and accessible to students. Each chapter in the book provides a sound theoretical and conceptual basis upon which the empirical studies rest. A completely new feature in this edition are the Cognitive Connection boxes in Chapters 2–17, designed to dig deep into the importance of the cognitive underpinnings to many types of behaviors. Each box focuses on a specific issue related to cognition and the particular topic covered in that chapter. As Principles of Animal Behavior makes clear, the tapestry of animal behavior is created from weaving all of these components into a beautiful whole. With Dugatkin’s exquisitely illustrated, comprehensive, and up-to-date fourth edition, we are able to admire that beauty anew.
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