What's the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking

Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak with H. James Wilson

Retail Price: $27.50 LS Price: $20.62 You Save: $6.88 (25%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. Format: Hardcover, 256pp. ISBN: 9781578519316 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: April 2003 Average Customer Review:

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The Secrets of Successful Idea Practitioners

Change management. Reengineering. Knowledge management. Major new management ideas are thrown at today's companies with increasing frequency—and each comes with evangelizing gurus and eager-to-assist implementation consultants. Only a handful of these ideas will be a good fit for your organization. Choose the right idea at the right time and your company can become more efficient, more effective, and more innovative. Choose the wrong one-or jump on the right bandwagon too late-and your company could fall hopelessly behind.

Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak say that some managers have found ways to improve their odds of success in the risky but essential game of idea management. In What's the Big Idea?, they introduce a largely unsung class of managers they call-idea practitioners-individuals who do the real work of importing and implementing new ideas into businesses. While gurus reap most of the credit when big ideas take flight, Davenport and Prusak's research reveals that idea practitioners actually play the most important role: They turn the right ideas into action.

Drawing from decades of consulting, academic, and business experience and from their novel study of more than 100 of these critical change leaders, What's the Big Idea? offers tools and frameworks for:

• Assessing the merits of the top business gurus
• Scanning and tracking emerging ideas in the marketplace
• Distinguishing promising ideas from rhetoric
• Refining ideas to suit your organization's particular needs
• Packaging and selling the idea internally
• Ensuring successful implementation

Davenport and Prusak prove that there are no faddish management ideas-only faddish ways of adopting them. Encouraging managers to embrace the power of ideas while avoiding the hype that often accompanies them, this pragmatic guide shows how passion and reason combine to build innovative companies.


Reviews

"In engaging language and with many current examples, Davenport and Prusak offer a convincing explanation of how a handful of organizations are able to consistently derive commercial benefit from the good ideas of their own people and others...a must-read... "

—Steve Kerr, Managing Director and Chief Learning Officer, Goldman Sachs

Thomas H. Davenport is Executive Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and a Professor at Babson College. Laurence Prusak is a researcher and consultant who coauthored In Good Company (with Don Cohen) and Working Knowledge (with Tom Davenport) and a Distinguished Scholar at Babson. H. James Wilson is a researcher and writer at the Institute for Strategic Change.

	Preface	vii
1	Winning with Ideas How Business Ideas Are Linked to Business Success	1
2	The Idea Practitioners Who Introduces Ideas to Organizations?	21
3	Ideas at Work It's the Content That Counts	49
4	The Guide to Gurus Where Good Management Ideas Come From	69
5	Market Savvy How Ideas Interact with Markets	97
6	Will It Fit? How Ideas Interact with Markets	123
7	The Reengineering Tsunami A Case Story of an Idea That Became a Tidal Wave	155
8	Knowledge Management A Case Story of a "P Cycle" Movement	179
9	Idea-Based Leadership How Can Your Organization Lead with Ideas?	195
•	Appendix A: A Select Survey of Business and Management Ideas	215
•	Appendix B: The Idea Practitioners	217
•	Appendix C: The Top Two Hundred Business Gurus	219
	Notes	223
	Index	231
	About the Authors	241

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