The company suggestion box poses a be-careful-what-you-wish-for dilemma. You want lots of ideas, but what happens when you get them? Responding to each suggestion is costly, especially if someone has to identify the right person to evaluate it. If one idea in ten is worth pursuing, that’s a great outcome for management but a demoralizing one for the large majority of employees whose brainchildren are rejected. And because employees don’t know why their ideas failed, they don’t learn how to come up with better ones.
A version of this article appeared in the December 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.