Description:

 Have you ever wanted to create a high performance work environment where ideas flowed freely - but did not know where to start?

Did you ever wish you could engage your employees in helping you solve all the problems that come up in your organization?
Have you ever felt your organization could do a lot better at encouraging ideas from its people, and at implementing the good ones?

Consider this:

• A worker in one of Europe's largest wireless communication companies stumbled across an error in his company's billing software that was costing some $30 million per year in lost revenues. He pointed out a simple way to fix it.
• A secretary at Grapevine Canyon Ranch realized that, when potential customers searched on the internet for guest ranches in the Southwestern United States, the major search engines were returning her company's website well down the list. She proposed a simple change that made it appear at the top.
• A prison guard at the Massachusetts Dept. of Correction sent in an idea to use digital cameras instead of film cameras to process new inmates. Across the Department's sixteen correctional facilities, his suggestion saved $56,000 per year.

In today's business environment, innovation is essential. Yet it is often elusive. It is also critical for family and privately held businesses to remain innovative as they face increasing global competition and challenges to succession. Warding off stagnation is tantamount to being a great and sustaining company. But how does innovation truly happen?

Every day, all over the world, front-line employees watch helplessly as their organizations waste incredible sums of money, lose customers, and miss opportunity after opportunity that to them are all too apparent. Companies that recognize the huge potential in the front-line ideas, and know how to tap it, gain significant competitive advantage, and become much more pleasant places to work.

For front-line employees, management's responsiveness to their ideas gives them a real chance to address many of the problems and opportunities they see on a daily basis, and to have a personal impact on the performance of their organizations. Today, the best managers companies get and implement more than fifty ideas per person per year from their front-line employees. (The average company in the United States gets one idea from every employee every two years, of which more than half are not used.) There is no reason why this couldn't happen in your organization too! It is purely a matter of management know-how and will.

This forum will focus on the innovation process and how to implement more ideas in your operations from your front line and long time employees. Alan Robinson will share his expertise gained from working with more than 300 organizations in 17 countries.