Isenberg School’s Operations Management Program Excels as Advocate for Productivity and Quality
Faculty Spotlight: Professor Alan Robinson
That is a cornerstone of Robinson’s latest book, Ideas Are Free (Berrett-Koehler). “It is simply impossible to achieve excellence in performance without paying attention to detail, an ability that comes only from large numbers of small ideas,” write Robinson and his coauthor, former Isenberg School professor Dean Schroeder. That requires full participation in the idea system by all of one’s employees, emphasizes Robinson, who conducted research for the book at 150 business and non-business organizations in 17 countries and helped another 150 organizations to implement the book’s ideas. Small ideas, he continues, are the best source of big ones. Managers should ask themselves: “Can a specific idea be used elsewhere in the organization? What other ideas does this one suggest? Are there patterns in the ideas that have come in?”
Idea systems, notes Robinson, offer an additional benefit—the opportunity to transform an organization and its culture toward continuously improving learning, productivity, and quality. “Our book delineates specific roles in the idea system for supervisors, middle managers, and senior leaders, as well as rank-and-file employees,” he explains. “And we spell out metrics for an idea system’s evaluation and improvement.”
If you want to observe a successful, mature idea system, visit Toyota, Robinson recommends. Toyota’s idea system, he explains, gains exceptional power from its alignment of values and subsystems throughout the organization. In other organizations, less mature, evolving systems might be driven disproportionately from different parts of the company. “Roger Milliken—the founder and CEO of Milliken & Company—was able to jump-start his company’s idea system from the top. In other companies, we’ve seen idea systems originate in work groups, middle management, divisions, and project teams,” notes Robinson. “Every organization has its own culture, which idea systems ultimately reflect and help shape.”
Since its publication in March, Ideas Are Free has been reaching a wider public with its own ideas. In June, it was the Readers’ Choice selection in Fast Company magazine. The book has also received kudos in the Washington Post, Harvard Management Update, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Investor’s Business Daily. And in October, Robinson and Schroeder were featured in separate interviews on CNN.com.
Point-of-task insights aside, many workplace challenges do elude common-sense solutions, notes Bisgaard. In a consulting project to improve the longevity of ball bearings in washing machines, Bisgaard devised a factorial design matrix to reveal the interaction effects of balls “osculating” in their environment. How, he asked, do you reduce the wear and tear on seven or eight interacting balls colliding with one another at different angles and velocities? “To solve that one, we needed to go beyond common-sense intuitions. We needed to model the interaction with statistical tools,” he told his audience.
Next: Professor Iqbal Agha
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| Faculty: Soren Bisgaard Alan Robinson Iqbal Agha Anna Nagurney Sara McComb | Alumni: Profile - Michael Sawa '98 Class Notes |