Ideas are free Robinson, Alan G; Robinson, Alan G; Schroeder, Dean M
2006., 2004, 2004-12-31, 2006-01-12
eBook
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.
In this volume, Schwartzman evaluates the range of ethnographic research that has been conducted on organizations. She also examines such important topics as: the roles and methods utilized by ...organizational ethnographers; the problems and prospects for conducting fieldwork in organizations; and the role that everyday but often overlooked routines - like meetings and story telling - play in the production and reproduction of organizations, institutions and society.
This book traces the evolution of the large industrial corporation in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom from the 1950s to the 1990s. It combines long-run trends with illustrative case studies ...of leading companies and their managers to present a complex picture of corporate change. In particular, it highlights the paradox of increasingly similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across advanced industrial nations with continuing marked differences in corporate ownership, control, and managerial élites. Despite strong institutional contrasts between the leading European economies, and regardless of the decline of the American model of management, big business in Europe has continued to follow a strategic and structural model pioneered in the United States during the first half of the 20th century and encapsulated long ago in Alfred Chandler's (1962) Strategy and Structure. This finding of similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across Europe challenges recent relativist perspectives on organisations found in postmodern, culturalist, and institutionalist social science. Nevertheless, it does not endorse standard universalist accounts of convergence either. The book distinguishes between Chandlerism, with its original ideology of universalism, and the broader Chandlerian perspective, an enduring but evolving core of good sense about the corporation in certain kinds of advanced economies. Thus, the book shows how the surprising success of conglomerate diversification and the increasing adoption of a more ‘networked’ multidivisional structure simply extends the core principles of the Chandlerian perspective.
The Marketing Service Institute has a 38 years history of funding high-profile scholarly research on topics that have managerial significance. MSI's pioneering work on developing a market ...orientation' has only been available as a series of working papers, is now presented in book form for the first time by Sage Publications. This book demonstrates the importance of market orientation on organizational culture ( the shared set of values in putting customer first), on strategy (creating superior value for a firm's customers), and on tactics (the set of cross-functional activities directed at creating an d satisfying customers)
