Building Better Ideas: How Constructive Debate Inspires Courage, Collaboration and Breakthrough Solutions

“In a world where just about every organization has to run faster even to stand still, this book is a quiet breakthrough of its own. It shows how to steadily and systematically create the structures, processes, and behaviors that keep good ideas from getting squashed—sorting them from the ones that are not particularly fruitful or viable—and get those built into practical plans for useful innovations. The book is so well written that experienced change agents and innovation novices alike will learn from it and see how to keep their organizations from both slow stagnation and sudden death.”  —Allan R Cohen, Distinguished Professor in Global Leadership, Babson College, and coauthor of Influence without Authority and Entrepreneurs in Every Generation “Ideas, in this day and age, are plentiful, but taking them from insight to action is another story. Kim Barnes draws on decades of experience to help us walk our ideas through the dense jungle and get us to the other side.” —Beverly Kaye, coauthor of Love ’Em or Lose ’Em and Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go “Organizations, communities, and nations desperately need new ideas. And new ideas require a climate in which they can be expressed freely, heard respectfully, and acted on urgently. Building Better Ideas offers a clear, practical, constructive road map for navigating the often-messy process of going from concept to action. Kim Barnes brings the material to life by weaving throughout the book a business fable that builds on and illustrates each concept, and at-a-glance charts enable quick and easy access to key concepts. Keep the good ideas in your organization from walking out the door through the application of the principles in this book.” —Jim Kouzes, coauthor of The Leadership Challenge and Executive Fellow, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University