This best-seller has become a “cult classic” for leaders and managers invested in building cultures of improvement and innovation. It was the first book to extensively research and articulate the surprising power of front-line ideas for performance improvement. It also showed the limitations of traditional approaches to gathering employee suggestions, and how the poor performance of these approaches has blinded managers to the value of front-line ideas.

Ideas Are Free introduced the concept of high-performing idea systems into mainstream management. Based on extensive first-hand research and work with more than 300 organizations worldwide, in dozens of industries, the book identifies what works, what doesn’t, and why when it comes to encouraging, getting, and implementing large numbers of front-line ideas.

The Idea-Driven Organization builds on the foundation laid by Ideas Are Free. While Ideas Are Free focused on what works, what doesn’t and why when it comes to tapping front-line ideas, this book focuses on how to do it. Incorporating a decade of further research and work in an expanded set of organizations around the world, the book begins by showing why 80% of an organization’s improvement potential lies in the creativity and ideas of front-line employees. It then turns to how to set up, lead, and grow idea processes that will have organization-wide impact on performance, innovation, and the quality of employees’ work lives.

Whether people want more government or less government, everyone wants efficient government. Traditional thinking is that improving the efficiency of government requires running it more like a business. But government is not a business. Practical Innovation in Government shows that this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones, and results in little overall progress.

Drawing from the largest study of government performance improvement in decades, Robinson and 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 in their study had attained levels of efficiency that rivalled the best private-sector companies. Practical Innovation in Government shows how government leaders – from the front-line to the top – can radically improve the performance of their organizations.

In Corporate Creativity, Alan Robinson and Sam Stern propose a radically different way to manage for creativity that allows companies to realize their creative potential and significantly improve their competitive position profitability.

Robinson and Stern investigated hundreds of creative acts in organizations around the world to make some surprising discoveries about how innovation and improvement actually happen.

Rich with detailed examples, Corporate Creativity reveals six essential elements that individuals and companies can use to turn their creativity from a hit-or-miss proposition into something consistent that they can count on.