Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak

Idea practitioners are the most important players in the entire process of importing and implementing new business and management ideas into organizations. They are the link between ideas and action. Without them, new ideas would remain on the periphery of organizations, and never get embedded into practice. Furthermore, the ideas wouldn’t be nearly as useful. These managers aren’t passive recipients of fully-shaped ideas. The good idea practitioners all filter out, add to, or subtract from the ideas they implement, “fitting” them to fit their organizations’ specific needs. In many cases, it’s from these individuals and their organizations that the gurus actually get their ideas and case examples.

We define idea practitioners as individuals who use business improvement ideas to bring about change in organizations. At some point in their careers they may have had managerial responsibility for achieving this objective. They may become consultants or academics at some point in their lives, but they have always worked for “real” companies or government agencies as well. Even when they are pontificating or generating new ideas themselves, it’s usually on the basis of their own experience.


What Do Idea Practitioners Do With Ideas?


Of course, every idea practitioner is different, as are their organizations and the ideas they propound. But we found a surprising degree of commonality with regard to how these individuals go about their idea-based leadership. The rough process that they follow is depicted serially, although a given idea may skip or repeat a step here and there, or follow a different order.


Scanning for and Identification of the Idea.


The first step for these idea practitioners is to identify an idea worth pursuing. As we’ve discussed, business improvement ideas don’t come pre-packaged; almost all of our idea practitioners synthesize multiple ideas and modify them for their organization’s need. Several managers reported that they feel the need for an inter-disciplinary approach to business thought leadership.

Idea practitioners consulted multiple external sources and worked with multiple external thought leaders. They read many business magazines, including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and others. One long-term idea practitioner, Laurence Baxter at Wachovia Bank, feels that one should look even more widely for new ideas, and that business literature is very limited. One time when we interviewed him, for example, he was reading a book on super string theory in physics.

Carol Bekar, who helped to introduce new information and knowledge management ideas to Bristol Myers Squibb, argued that if people are going to read business books, they should consult relatively timeless ones, not books that become rapidly dated. She cites works by Peter Drucker as examples. She also believes it’s important to consult sources from outside your own country. She personally reads The Economist for a non-US point of view. Reuben Slone, a Whirlpool executive currently in charge of logistics and supply chain management, feels that printed sources—particularly Harvard Business Review—are a good place to start, but that further research on the Internet is important to determine whether an idea is suitable for adoption.

Academic and other external relationships are important sources of ideas for idea practitioners. They are the most likely participants in management conferences, workshops, and multi-client research programs. They’re the mainstays of industry-sponsored research programs at business schools. At times they even have university affiliations. Gene Meieran at Intel, for example, is the company’s “senior sponsor” for its relationships with MIT. He works with both the business and engineering schools there, and with special programs such as the Media Lab and the joint business/engineering program Leaders for Manufacturing. At one point he even became the Director of Research for the program with a faculty designation. He’s also on the Board of Advisors for the Materials Engineering Department at Purdue, the Dean’s Board of Advisors at the University of New Mexico, and “hangs out” at Berkeley, Stanford, and Michigan. Meieran also says he (and Intel) get many good ideas from the company’s sponsorship of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fairs (Intel ISEF), in which high school students compete for scholarships.

In some cases, individuals may arrive at a company with a particular idea in mind. They may even have been recruited for that reason. Reuben Slone of Whirlpool came to the auto parts manufacturer Federal Mogul from stints as a consultant with Ernst & Young and EDS. His role at Federal-Mogul was to lead reengineering and other approaches to process change. He had been an early adopter of these approaches as a consultant, and was brought in to lead the initiatives because of his expertise. Since then, however, Reuben has evolved his role, taking responsibility for e-business and then logistics at Whirlpool after leaving General Motors.

But several of the managers we interviewed testified to the benefits of knowing the organization well before attempting to fit an idea to it. Some of the relevant dimensions include whether the company is low-tech or high, mature or young, its competitive environment, its average age, and so forth. Giora Hadar, who has been involved in several new change programs to the US Federal Aviation Administration, notes that the three cultural prongs of the FAA are “safety and system efficiency.” It’s a conservative organization, and ignoring these dimensions when introducing a new program is a recipe for failure.


Packaging the Idea


Language is an important aspect of how an idea is packaged in order to make it appealing and more likely to succeed. Joe McCrea, until recently the UK government’s director of “Knowledge-Enhanced Government,” and now a consultant to the Labor government, has given considerable thought to how to package an idea—and how to remember its essence. The following four points came from his response to our questions:

• Firstly and most important, keep your eyes on the prize. Have a clear idea in your own head about the ultimate possibility for your idea if everything went perfectly. And then work back with the hundreds of steps that you will need to take to attain perfection.
• Keep the description of your idea very, very simple. Dressing it up in lots of fancy words and jargon might impress the ranks of the initiated, but it won’t attract, motivate, or inspire Joe Bloggs. Also, don’t forget that many people that may wish to oppose you, will totally underestimate anything that isn’t dressed up in fancy language and jargon. So, the more radical the idea, the more matter-of-factly you should describe it.
• Don’t spell out the full ultimate significance of your idea unless and until you absolutely have to. Grand designs set out at the outset of your idea might be a great boost to your own ego, but they also tend to attract the fainthearts and potential enemies before your idea is mature enough to fend for itself. A truly radical idea is like a small child. It needs to be protected and nurtured in the beginning.
• If you can, break down your big idea into lots of little ideas, and set them running in the organization. This is what a friend of mine called “Trojan mice.” They will naturally coalesce over time without your overt intervention.

Of course, it’s possible to oversimplify (or over-shrink) an idea. Hubert Saint-Onge, until recently a senior manager and idea practitioner at Clarica, summarizes this risk when he notes, “I don’t do t-shirts.” Reducing complicated ideas to short slogans may work in some organizations, but it’s more likely to create misunderstandings and false expectations.


Advocating the Idea


No business idea takes root within an organization purely on its own merits. Instead it has to be sold—to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. Our idea practitioners spend a great deal of time and effort on the advocacy of the idea—on packaging it up and selling it around their organizations.

The simplest, most straightforward aspect of advocacy is to seek senior executive support. The CEO is, of course, the most desirable sponsor. According to one idea practitioner we interviewed, “Ideas that get CEO support get implemented. Those that don’t, don’t.” But in our own experience, it’s not always that simple. We can recall ideas whose names had never crossed the CEO’s lips (knowledge management at Hewlett-Packard, for example), but the idea was still successful, at least up to a point. We also remember organizations where there was CEO support (e.g., reengineering at Xerox), but the idea eventually died anyway. At Xerox, the problem was a particularly entrenched middle management bureaucracy, and a CEO (really, the president of the largest business unit) who left the organization and was succeeded by a non-believer. Eventually, however, any new business idea will need CEO-level support if it’s going to have a big impact on the organization.

One of the critical success factors in advocacy is to link the idea to something the organization already cares about and can easily understand. For example, Antonella Padova, who led knowledge management efforts at Whirlpool, knew that the senior management of the company—particularly the CEO—passionately believed that innovation was going to be a key factor in Whirlpool’s future success. The firm could no longer make commodity home appliances; it had to be innovative in its products and services. When Padova was advocating for knowledge management, she realized that the way to get buy-in for the topic was to tie it to innovation.

Idea practitioners have to use all of the tools at their disposal. If they can enlist others on the outside or the inside and build coalitions to advance their ideas, they should do so. This is particularly important when the idea practitioner is trying to influence levels higher in the organizational hierarchy. Josh Plaskoff, a knowledge management consultant at Eli Lilly and Company, once persuaded a friend at another company to persuade internal executives about the virtues of knowledge management. They were ostensibly visiting the company to talk about training and development, but Plaskoff notes, “ They came back from the trip really high on knowledge management. I could not have gotten them to this level of excitement alone.”


Make It Happen


The business of implementation is less about ideas than about managing people, budgets, projects, and processes. The best firms and idea practitioners, however, know when it’s time to shift from ideas to action.

One company where the topic of “making it happen” does come up frequently is at General Electric. Perhaps that’s why the company has been so successful at idea-based change. The company has a well-defined “Operating System” of management meetings, planning sessions, and reviews to ensure that ideas get embedded into practice all around the company. For one of the company’s more recent idea-driven initiatives, the e-business or digitization idea, there were a number of components that helped to drive implementation. For example, then-CEO Jack Welch announced that each business had to explain how it would become the e-business leader in its industry at a forthcoming strategy review. There were speeches from external e-business leaders at meetings of GE executives. An e-business leader was appointed in each business unit. A “destroy your business.com” study was undertaken in each business.

How could GE not succeed with e-business ideas given all these implementation mechanisms?

Idea practitioners we interviewed mentioned several aspects of implementation from which aspiring idea practitioners could benefit. They are listed below:

• Ideas need to show a quick payoff, so keep track of financial costs and benefits;
• A fast win may actually be a loss; major change involves working on foundations, which takes time;
• Every idea needs an implementation plan if it’s going to go anywhere;
• Tie the execution of the idea into performance appraisals and promotions;
• Experiment, then scale up;
• Unqualified successes are those in which the new ideas are useful to individual workers’ jobs (so the fit has to be perfect or the idea or the job must be redesigned);
• At some point, you have to know when to get out of the way and let others execute.

A key implementation issue is whether and when to create a specialized function to promote and manage the idea. Some ideas of the past several years have led to well-established functions. Many firms, for example, had functions oriented to the management of quality; fewer for re-engineering. The number of organizations with knowledge management functions and “Chief Knowledge Officers” may still be on the rise. In many cases such an organization is useful at early stages of implementation. Before an idea becomes well understood across the organization, it will benefit from a collection of experts and facilitators. Perhaps the best situation of all is when a new idea originates within a specific related functional area, then moves as a corporate function reporting to a general manager, then gets eliminated or highly shrunk down in size as the idea becomes embedded within the entire business. In many firms, quality is now part of everyone’s job, not the province of a particular function or department.


Take the Idea External


In the best of all possible worlds of business ideas, new approaches would first be implemented internally, and then taken externally as a product or service. Six Sigma quality tools, for example, could be embedded not just into internal processes, but into services for customers (as is the case in General Electric’s Services Network). Knowledge management could be sold directly to a professional services firm’s clients, rather than only selling hours (as did Ernst & Young with its “Ernie” online knowledge offering).

This doesn’t just happen automatically. Someone has to consciously look for opportunities to take ideas outside. At State Street Bank, for example, Debbie Smith has been asked to lead a group that takes new financial and business improvement ideas directly to customers. If a company is truly passionate about ideas, it’s a natural step to try to make money by selling them.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson, and is also the Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. Laurence Prusak is a Distinguished Scholar at Babson. This article is adapted from their new book, What’s the Big Idea: Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking (Harvard Business School Press).