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

Major new management ideas are thrown at today's companies with increasing frequency. But only a handful of these ideas will be a good fit for your organization. If you choose the right idea at the right time, your company can become more efficient, more effective, and more innovative. But if you choose the wrong idea -- or if you jump on the right bandwagon too late -- your company could fall hopelessly behind.

By ideas, we mean approaches to improving business performance and management. These include: total quality management, reengineering, knowledge management, activity-based costing, worker empowerment, balanced scorecards, and a thousand other ideas with the potential to get a business into better shape.

The question is: Which ideas are worth adopting in your business? Specifically, which ones will bolster your organization's performance and enhance its reputation? And which ones will turn out to be nothing more than passing fads?

In most successful companies, idea practitioners are the ones who try to answer these vital questions. In What's the Big Idea?, Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak explain that idea practitioners bring in new ideas, modify them to suit their organizations, and help implement them.

Davenport is executive director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and a professor at Babson College. Prusak is a researcher, a consultant, and a distinguished scholar at Babson.

Drawing from decades of consulting, academic, and business experience and from their study of more than 100 of these critical change leaders, Davenport and Prusak offer tools and frameworks for:

• Distinguishing promising ideas from hype;
• Refining ideas to suit your company's unique needs; and
• Ensuring successful implementation.

This summary will change the way you think about new business ideas, as well as older ideas that are still surprisingly effective.

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