Welcome to Blue Shirt Nation

Then there’s Pfeifer. The Colorado Springs store employee wrote a 108-page thesis on how Best Buy could improve video game sales. Later, in the fall of 2007, he started sharing his ideas on Blue Shirt Nation; before long, they caught the attention of employees at corporate.

The company flew Pfeifer to the Twin Cities for a series of planning meetings. By his count, he logged almost 14,000 miles in nine trips to headquarters last year. (He’s not at liberty to reveal his ideas publicly just yet.)

Pfeifer wasn’t forced to share his ideas. Best Buy paid him his regular hourly wage plus travel reimbursement—no inflated consulting retainer. But because he had a venue where co-workers and supervisors listened, regardless of his rank, he chose to contribute his insights.

Best Buy has learned that what separates a company from the pack is the ability to sort, process, and polish ideas fast.

That was the magic Bendt and Koelling had stumbled onto: having open conversations can help the company learn from employees, most of whom are experts in the jobs they perform and, often, in the products in which they specialize.

The question then shifted to how else the company could apply this discovery. If Best Buy had a similar dialogue with its customers, would they too share their ideas, feedback, and expertise?

Slide Show Manifesto

Bendt and Koelling set out to create a single, coherent document that would distill all they had learned from the launch of Blue Shirt Nation. It would also be a road map for how those ideas could be implemented elsewhere. The result: a 15-slide “manifesto” titled “An open, social strategy.” Adhering to the philosophy, the pages were posted on Koelling’s public blog in November, where anybody—co-workers, customers, competitors—can view and comment on it.