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Front-line workers see a great many problems and opportunities that management doesn't. Their ideas are a tremendous resource that most organizations shamelessly squander. It is simply impossible to achieve excellence in performance - whether in customer satisfaction, responsiveness, productivity, quality, attention to detail, or simply in keeping costs low - without the ability to listen to and act on large numbers of employee ideas.

This session, based on Alan's new book Ideas Are Free, will show managers how to fundamentally change the way they lead. Some of the companies in the Ideas Are Free study are getting and using extraordinary numbers of ideas - in some cases more than fifty per person per year. Not only do they perform at far higher levels than their competitors, but they are happier, less stressful and more satisfying places to work in, for both managers and employees.

Alan's recent book Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen (co-authored with Sam Stern) has been translated into twelve foreign languages, including Japanese, and has also been brought out in audiotape and video. It was chosen as a main selection of the Executive Program Book Club, was an Amazon.com Business and Investment Editor's Pick, was a finalist in the 1998 Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Best Business Book Awards, and was named "Book of the Year" by the Academy of Human Resource Management.

In the course of his research on corporate creativity Alan has worked with several hundred companies around the world, in countries including the United States, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, Denmark, China, India, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Brazil, Greece, Sweden, Jamaica, France and Russia.

He has been a consultant to more than eighty companies in eleven countries on how to improve their creative performance, and has served on the Board of Examiners of the United States' Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.