Employees: The Power of Suggestion

By changing its sales contracts to include extra charges for valuable bismuth sprinkled through its copper byproducts, Kennecott Copper this year will earn an extra $100,000. Accountant Robert J. Edwards, who proposed the addition, has profited too. The $25,000 that Kennecott awarded him made Edwards the top winner among 500,000 employees to whom major corporations paid $19 million for suggestions last year.

Suggestion boxes were once considered a joke, and some employees still treat them that way. Most managers now take them quite seriously, have lately started to solicit suggestions from engineers and supervisors as well as clerks and production...

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