Rating: 
Summary: Certain to Become a Business "Classic"
Review: Within a few hours of reading this latest book co-authored by Davenport and Prusak with H. James Wilson, I went into a meeting with the senior managers of one of my consulting clients. The only item on the agenda was the perceived need for generating more suggestions from among the company's 575 employees. More specifically, suggestions as to how to produce more and better work in less time and thereby lower operating costs while increasing productivity and improving efficiency. (Sound familiar?) Still absorbing Davenport and Prusak's information and (especially) insights, I posed for the group a series of questions:1. Is this company idea-driven? 2. Are workers encouraged to suggest new/better ideas? 3. Are they convinced each suggestion will be carefully considered? 4. Are the best ideas then recognized and rewarded? 5. Are those suggestions then acted upon in a timely manner? Long pause. Silence. The senior managers resembled what Darrell Royal once described as "a young goat staring at a new gate." Clearing of throats. Finally, the CEO asked "Well, what about it?" Finally, those in the group admitted that the answer to all of the was the same: sometimes. Translation: Seldom. In Working Knowledge (1997), Davenport and Prusak explain how organizations manage what they know. In The Good Company (2001), Cohen and Prusak explain how social capital makes organizations work. In this volume, Davenport and Prusak explain how to create and capitalize on the best management thinking. However, any business idea (no matter how BIG it may seem to some) is essentially worthless unless and until it contributes to business success. In this volume, they focus on "idea practitioners" and "gurus." The former are those within an organization who assess and translate and develop new ideas to bring into the organization and subsequently fight for them. The latter are "boundary spanners" who work with rather than within an organization, sharing what they have learned from their exposure to both theory and practice-oriented ideas as they interact with companies ("the primary source of their ideas"), think and write (analyses for clients as well as articles and books for publication), and present their ideas at meetings and conferences (thereby attracting attention and new clients as well as earning substantial appearance fees). Davenport and Prusak examine the work of several dozen "idea practitioners" and "gurus." In Appendix C, they rank "The Top Two Hundred Business Gurus," with the top five being Michael Porter, Tom Peters, Robert Reich, Peter Drucker, and Gary Becker. Carefully organizing their material within nine chapters, Davenport and Prusak explain how ideas are linked to business success, who introduces ideas to organizations and how they do that, why "content counts," where the best management ideas come from, how ideas interact with markets, where to find ideas most appropriate to a given organization and then how to sell them, and why idea-based leadership is essential to any organization's success. I've already mentioned Appendix C. The other two, Appendices A and B, provide "A Select Survey of Business and Management Ideas" and "The Idea Practitioners." To the best of my knowledge, this is the first single volume in which cutting-edge thinking about intellectual capital, social capital, creative business thinking, process simplification/improvement, knowledge management, and idea leadership is not only combined but correlated and indeed integrated into what can be (with certain modifications) a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system for generating the best ideas and then effectively putting them into practice. At the outset of the review, I presumed to include the five questions posed to the senior managers. After re-reading this book, I am even more convinced that these are questions which decision-makers must ask inorder to determine the extent to which their organization is not only receptive to new and better ideas but wholeheartedly determined to generate or adopt and then implement them. Davenport and Prusak are dead on: There must be an Idea Strategy. More importantly, there must be an Idea-Friendly Culture which has (a) open dialogue between and among ALL levels, (b) what Jack Welch calls "boundarylessness" which maximizes individual and collective intellect from both within and outside the organization, and finally, (c) trust and responsibility which will, Davenport and Prusak assert, "allow people to learn effectively from each other and provide motivation for putting ideas to work." This book is certain to become a business "classic."
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