Can Strict Idea Policies Lead to Corruption?

The whole issue of how to set the right level of expectations for ideas is less complicated than it sounds. All that companies like Boardroom are doing is saying, in a way that works for them, "if you work here, you are expected to give in ideas. It's part of the job". My understanding is that Boardroom doesn't push the policy too hard, it is simply a strong signal of one of the behaviors it most values in its employees.

It is certainly possible to go overboard. In the mid-1990s, 3M realized that its famous "30 percent of sales must come from products less than four years old" policy was dysfunctional. One senior executive there told us that when managers needed to meet this quota, they would often do the equivalent of changing the color of a product from red to green. It also led to an organizational reluctance to devote time to improving older products. That's why 3M quietly sidelined the policy, and went to Pacing-Plus. Mark is right to be concerned about a potential corrupting effect.

I am still pondering one of the first of these "ideas are expected" policies, which I encountered in 1987 at Sumitomo Electric in Japan. As I remember it, the policy was that any manager who failed to get an average of at least five ideas per person per year in his area of responsibility (so a VP with 1,000 people needed 5,000 ideas, and a supervisor with 10 employees needed 50) was ineligible for promotion for three years. The CEO did not think this was unfair because the average number of ideas per employee was over fifteen per year -- it was simply a signal to managers that they had better pay attention to employee ideas.

The Soviet Union got into trouble by putting ridiculous quotas for ideas onto its managers. A third of their monthly bonuses depended on hitting certain numbers of ideas, a certain economic effect and (most dysfunctional of all) paying out certain reward monies, irrespective of what ideas actually came in.