Alan G. Robinson

Roughly eighty percent of an organisation's improvement potential sits with front-line staff rather than with managers. That claim runs through everything Alan G. Robinson has published, and he has spent decades gathering field evidence for it. He holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, along with bachelor's and master's degrees from Cambridge, and teaches at the Isenberg School of Management at Massachusetts Amherst; he has also held teaching posts in Russia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, China and Vietnam. The Idea-Driven Organization, written with Dean M. Schroeder of Valparaiso University and published in 2014, extends their earlier Ideas Are Free with further fieldwork inside a fresh set of companies and public bodies. Robinson has advised organisations in some twenty-five countries and sat on the board of examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. An earlier book with Sam Stern, Corporate Creativity, reached the final shortlist for the Financial Times global business book award.