Our Northeast Region Shingo Conference, held Sept. 25–26, 2012, is all about sharing information, ideas, problems, plans—all of those things that can make the sum of the parts greater than the whole. So a story about the power of sharing ideas seems appropriate.

As a new vice president of operations some years back, I inherited a foundering “suggestion program.” Determined to encourage greater participation from our employees, I talked up the program on the shop floor. “Nobody ever followed up on my idea,” one employee reported to me. Another showed me an idea he had submitted about part simplification and said, “I got a rejection notice but no explanation.” This was the general tenor of feedback from the floor: Ideas were rejected with no explanations.

When I took these concerns to the blue-ribbon evaluation committee, the responses were defensive.

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