The Secrets of Successful Idea Practitioners
Change management. Reengineering. Knowledge management. Major new management ideas are thrown at today’s companies with increasing frequency-and each comes with evangelizing gurus and eager-to-assist implementation consultants. Only a handful of these ideas will be a good fit for your organization. Choose the right idea at the right time and your company can become more efficient, more effective, and more innovative. Choose the wrong one-or jump on the right bandwagon too late-and your company could fall hopelessly behind.
Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak say that some managers have found ways to improve their odds of success in the risky but essential game of idea management. In What’s the Big Idearight ideas into action.
Drawing from decades of consulting, academic, and business experience and from their novel study of more than 100 of these critical change leaders, What’s the Big Idea? offers tools and frameworks for:
Assessing the merits of the top business gurus
Scanning and tracking emerging ideas in the marketplace
Distinguishing promising ideas from rhetoric
Refining ideas to suit your organization’s particular needs
Packaging and selling the idea internally
Ensuring successful implementation
Davenport and Prusak prove that there are no faddish management ideas-only faddish ways of adopting them. Encouraging managers to embrace the power of ideas while avoiding the hype that often accompanies them, this pragmatic guide shows how passion and reason combine to build innovative companies.
Thomas H. Davenport is the Director of Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change, and has accepted a faculty position at Babson College starting this Fall. Laurence Prusak is the Director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management. Jim Wilson is an associate of the Institute for Strategic Change.