A Better Way -- but You Have to Say

Keeping Your Good Ideas to Yourself Costs You and the Company

We made sure to eat our veggies, keep our No. 2 pencils within the lines of the SAT bubbles, and wait our turn to get onto the bus.

So why in the world would we jump out of order and tell the boss what the company could do to make things run more smoothly? It's against everything we've been taught. But if a manager goes about things right, good ideas can flow uphill. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all stop saying such things as "They wouldn't want to hear about it anyway." Or "We've never done it that way." Or "My boss won't let me."

It should go without saying that a company should listen to its front-line employees. After all, those are the people who are called on to carry out managers' plans. They likely will know if something needs to be changed, and how. But so many times companies don't listen, employees aren't encouraged to come forward, creative minds assume their suggestions will sink in the bureaucratic swamp.

But some companies, and some employees, have learned to break out of that routine.

Take Joe Perrone. Three years ago, as a regional sales manager for FedEx in New York City, Perrone had a bright idea. Staring out the window, he saw a handful of FedEx trucks sitting in the streets of Manhattan while their drivers made pickups. As it was, small-business customers without regular FedEx pickups would be frustrated hiking past FedEx trucks on their way to the nearest FedEx office. What if, he thought, people could drop their FedEx packages through a slot in those trucks?

Perrone thought his idea could have great implications for the company he started with 22 years earlier. He wanted to give it a try.

He took it to his manager, who told him to go ahead and develop the idea but warned it would not be easy. Perrone had to go through seven different departments and sell the idea to each one. The trick, he said, was to ask them what they thought of the idea, and how he could make it work for them.

"Since I was the one willing to [do] all the legwork, they said, 'If you want to knock yourself out, go right ahead,' " Perrone said in an interview last week.

The final product was a culmination of many of those departments' tweaks and polishes. It took more than a year to accomplish. But without Perrone, customers in many big cities wouldn't be able to drop their packages through slots on FedEx trucks.

Today, there are 1,500 of those trucks nationwide. And Perrone is now a sales executive for the company in Long Island, promoted several times since the big idea.