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
Chapter 1 Wining with Ideas
Chapter 2 The Idea Practitioners
Chapter 3 Ideas at Work
Chapter 4 The Guide to Gurus
Chapter 5 Market Savvy
Chapter 6 Will It Fit?
Chapter 7 The Reengineering Tsunami
Chapter 8 Knowledge Management
Chapter 9 Idea-Based Leadership
Appendix A A Select Survey of Business and Management Ideas
Appendix B The Idea Practitioners
Appendix C The Top Two Hundred Business Gurus