-Power is a powerful idea-generating system that harnesses the knowledge and creativity of every single manager and employee at every level of the organization. It results in both large money-making, money-saving breakthroughs and thousands of small improvements throughout an organization.

I-Power takes very little time, very little money -- and it works. Created and developed at Boardroom Inc. by Martin Edelston, on a suggestion from business guru Peter Drucker, I-Power led to tens of millions of dollars in increased revenue for Boardroom. I-Power has been used by more than 1,200 companies and organizations, profit and nonprofit -- big, medium and small.

The I-Power Mission

To make continuous improvement part of an organization’s culture... part of the natural way people work and think every single day.

Not More Work as Usual

What if you could root out the stand-pat attitudes that permeate most organizations?

Attitudes such as: That’s the way we do it... There’s one right way to do a job... Don’t fix it until it’s broken... Not my job... It’s good enough.

What if you could replace those attitudes with one dominant philosophy -- every single person in the organization works every single day to make everything better.

I-Power is not work as usual. I-Power motivates people to think every day about improvement. It literally makes continuous improvement part of an organization’s culture.

This is the story of I-Power, the continuous improvement, interactive management system that was instrumental in spurring Boardroom Inc., the Connecticut publishing firm that developed I-Power, to double productivity, quadruple revenue and send profits through the roof—all in less than five years!

In its first year, Boardroom’s I-Power program generated more than 7,000 ideas from the 66 members of the Boardroom team. Out of that flowed nearly 2,000 concrete, specific improvements, big ones and small ones. The following year, the number of employees increased to 70. They generated more than 10,000 ideas and thousands of implemented improvements.

I-Power has been utilized by more than 1,000 other organizations and entrepreneurs across the country -- departments in large companies, such as Rubbermaid and Federal Express... midsize companies... small companies... profit and nonprofit, such as The American Red Cross, Chicago District and Big Brothers/Big Sisters in New York City... as well as The United States Navy Atlantic Sealift Command and public health departments in several states.

You can learn everything you need to start an I-Power continuous improvement program and keep it running effectively.

Use I-Power as an organizational tool to improve every facet of doing business.

Use I-Power as a manager to significantly improve the performance of your department or working group.

Use I-Power as an individual to make your job more interesting, creative and productive. You’ll even be able to use I-Power to make your personal life better.

A Brief History

I-Power was created by Martin Edelston, founder and president of Boardroom Inc. (Edelston likes to say he didn’t create the system -- he simply reinvented it.)

Origin of the discovery: A meeting between Edelston and Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant. Drucker asked him how meetings at Boardroom were going. Edelston answered: “Pretty bad. But aren’t meetings at most organizations bad?”

Drucker made a suggestion that led to the birth of I-Power “Ask everyone who comes to a meeting to be prepared with two ideas for making his or her work, or the department’s work, more productive.”

Edelston took Drucker’s suggestion to heart. Back at Boardroom, he called a meeting of people from all levels of the company. Number one on the meeting agenda -- two ideas from each individual for improving work, making money or saving money. At the meeting, Edelston was surprised and awed by the enthusiasm with which people threw out ideas. It was the first meeting in a long time that he really enjoyed. In fact, Boardroom got one of its best ideas ever for a new product at that first meeting. And the idea did not come from someone in marketing or creative or editorial. The great idea came from someone who worked in the mailroom.

Edelston was unprepared for that great flow of ideas. He personally jotted down notes -- which he promptly lost. He called two more meetings. Several people took notes. Each time, Edelston was impressed by the continuous flow of ideas, but he also wound up feeling guilty and embarrassed because there was no system in place to follow through and to make sure things got done.

So the idea-generating meetings were abandoned…the ideas lost. Since Boardroom appeared to be doing fabulously at the time, it didn’t seem as if any great harm was done.

Six months later, in the spring of 1989, it became clear to Edelston that Boardroom had grown too fat from its success. What followed was a major and very painful staff cutback. Edelston paid generous severance and helped most people find new work, but he still felt bad. He was also haunted by that gold mine of ideas that had gotten away. That is when he began to formalize the I-Power system.

Edelston knew the kind of company he wanted to own and run -- an organization governed both in theory and fact by the practice of continuous improvement. He had no patience for the kind of an organization where top management comes up with objectives and procedures once or twice a year and passes them down to everyone else -- relying on a bureaucracy of middle managers to make sure that everybody does what they are supposed to do. In fact, Boardroom had always been a “flat” organization.

But Edelston realized that bureaucracies do not only exist on organization charts. They also exist in people’s minds. People had to stop saying to themselves, “That’s the way we do it. Good enough. Not my job.” They had to be encouraged to start looking at everything they did fresh and new, and say, “Wait, how can I do this just a little bit better?”

The next question was -- how to encourage that way of thinking?

One thing those few idea-generating meetings had shown Edelston was that there was no shortage of good ideas for improvement. Those meetings clearly demonstrated that the people doing the actual work often knew best where the problems, waste and opportunities were... even better than Edelston and his top managers.

But these same people did not seem to volunteer their ideas on their own, during their day-to-day work. Despite the fact that Boardroom had always had a casual, open-door style of management. Edelston also knew that even when organizations had formal suggestion programs, very few people participated.

Edelston’s conclusion: He had to really push for ideas -- and he had to pay attention to what people said. And respond to what they said. He needed an idea-generating system that would get rid of blaming and complaining -- that provided every man and woman in the organization a formal, yet simple system, to make everything better.

In essence, Edelston took the simple idea of asking people for their ideas -- a traditional idea program -- added eight unique features and a practical way to process the ideas quickly and created a perpetual engine for improving every part of the Boardroom operations. Along the way, I-Power lifted motivation, participation and the thinking level of everybody in the organization.

Before the idea of an idea-generating “system” begins to sound scary, understand that only three people were involved in processing all of the thousands of ideas at Boardroom. None of them spent more than an hour or two a week doing it, either.

One of the best things about I-Power is that it is simple. It takes practically no time and very little money to start up and run. There is no time-consuming training and indoctrination... no long meetings... and no complicated monitoring and reporting systems. I-Power is consistent with any other employee-involvement, quality programs already working for the company.

Basic I-Power Themes that you can use to produce great ideas...

What are two ideas for what you can do personally to...

Be more productive every day

Service customers better

Organize your desk or work area better

Be more accurate in your work

Be more positive

Communicate better with the people you work with

Be a better listener

Be more open to other people’s ideas

What the company can do to...

Foster improvement

Save money

Make money

Improve quality

Be more efficient

Improve productivity

Boost profitability

Come up with new product ideas

To learn more about how I-Power has helped other companies, click here.