Thinking Small
Forget about finding the killer app. New research shows that smaller ideas pack a bigger payoff.
Published August 2004
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLELeslie Fishbein, president of Kacey Fine Furniture, was idly watching a T-Mobile commercial when inspiration struck. What if we replace our drivers' cell phones with camera phones, she wondered. That way, she figured, delivery personnel at the Denver retailer could take photographs at their destinations to show that they had not damaged a customer's walls or floors -- or, if they did, document the problem instantly.
Not especially revolutionary or groundbreaking, Fishbein knew, but clearly a step forward. In fact, that's exactly the kind of modest brainstorm for which Fishbein constantly is hunting. Her six-show-room chain thrives on new ideas. Fishbein collects them in three-ring binders. Since 1995, she's filled four such binders -- at 10 to 20 ideas per page and 200-plus pages per binder, that's more than 10,000 ideas. And the best ones, she says, often turn out to be those that at first appeared simple, even mundane. "The point," she says, "is not the big hit but incremental improvements all the time."
What about the killer app, the bold, outside-the-box brainstorm that is supposed to transform organizations? If you really care about making ideas work for you, forget such ambitious notions, say Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder in their new book Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations. Rather than big, competition-leapfrogging advances, the authors argue that one of the keys to business success is the constant implementation of small ideas -- just like the steady stream of employee suggestions Fishbein collects in her binders. Why singles instead of home runs? The competition inevitably copies or counters your home runs, rendering those gains ephemeral. But after studying idea-generation tactics at 150 companies in 17 countries, Robinson and Schroeder concluded that small ideas, especially those particular to processes or systems, improve companies in almost Darwinian fashion with ongoing small adaptations that are often impossible to copy.
What's more, the best small ideas often take on a life of their own, generating a torrent of related suggestions. Consider Fishbein's experience with the camera phones. The new devices had barely been distributed before the company's 205 employees began chiming in with all sorts of additional suggestions. Indeed, documenting delivery damage is now only one of the phones' many uses. Faced with a tight stairwell or narrow hallways, delivery crews now show the bottleneck to Kacey's director of transportation, who can often advise them over the phone instead of rushing to the scene. Loading dock workers document merchandise damaged in shipment and instantly e-mail the photos to the manufacturer, speeding up both claims and replacement. And upon delivery, after positioning, say, a sofa, a worker can take pictures of the entire living room -- capturing, perhaps, the lack of end tables and lamps. Guess what the salesperson mentions in his follow-up call?
Encouraging a steady stream of small ideas helps prime the pump for big ones.
The authors found something similar at a small Danish subsidiary of the U.S. textile manufacturer Milliken & Co. The Danish company's looms -- the same machines in place at countless other factories around the world -- were running three to four times faster than the manufacturer believed possible. The looms were also making products that the manufacturer's own engineers said were not possible. How? "Thanks to hundreds of little ideas from their frontline employees," says Schroeder, a professor at the College of Business Administration at Valparaiso University. "Add a knob here so you can change the tension, a simple procedure for moving materials in and out faster -- all kinds of ideas, so many that the loom no longer resembles what the manufacturer delivered." Thus the key advantage of small ideas over big ideas: Because they're much more likely to remain proprietary, small ideas more often result in a sustainable competitive advantage.
