Thinking Outside the Suggestion Box

Learn how to involve every team member as an inventor of the future of your organization.

Providing an environment that actively engages your most valuable resource, your employees, is a key management responsibility and one of the tenets of the Toyota Production System (respect for the individual/creating a culture that nurtures their creativity). Unfortunately, in most businesses, most employees are trained to do a good day’s work while leaving the creative part to just a few people. This type of culture fails to maximize peoples’ ability to make a valuable contribution.

In 25 years as a student of TPS, or Lean as it is also called, GBMP Consulting Group President Bruce Hamilton, has learned first-hand that companies who succeed with Lean year after year are those who capitalize on the knowledge and imagination of their employees. GBMP’s slogan "everybody everyday" means everybody in the organization is a problem-solver and an idea-person. With every job cycle, the mental wheels of your employees’ brains should be turning: "How can I do this easier or better -- or faster and, yes, less expensively, too.” And while many companies are fast out of the blocks with improvement, few seem to have the endurance to make improvement efforts truly continuous.

What is the key for those few who succeed? They keep harnessing the renewable energy of their employees. In these idea-rich companies, not only do all employees understand the ideal of perfect service to the customer, they are actively moving the organization in that direction. It's human nature to want to contribute.

In this fun, engaging and enlightening (32-minute) DVD, you will learn to encourage and celebrate your employees' ideas. There's no universal way to recognize and reward employees for their knowledge and creativity, and every company does it differently. However, as this video shows, many small improvements accompanied by frequent modest recognition for many employees are far more effective than once-in-a-while and large recognitions for a few. Researcher Alan Robinson says ideas are "free" and employees will gladly make improvements as part of their job if the environment you create is right.

The important thing is to get started developing that favorable environment. This DVD will help you begin and then you'll learn what works best for your employees and your company through experience. You'll also learn to sustain participation in your idea system. Your employees’ creativity is your greatest asset. Start harnessing it today!