Idea Harvest™ is a corporate improvement methodology that draws out the operational fixes a company's own people already see, and turns them into specific actions leadership can move on.
Developed by Harvest Earnings over three decades, it works on a simple principle: the people doing the work spot the broken processes and the better way to do things long before anyone above them does. Idea Harvest™ is the process for getting that knowledge out of their heads and into a form a leader can act on — all the way to approved ideas, valued down to the dollar, with a person assigned to carry each one out.
It's also the methodology that led to Tell Jules. To understand what Jules does, it helps to understand where the method came from and why it works the way it does.
The conviction behind the method has a source. One of its co-founders, Jeremy Eden, started his career at McKinsey. The job was simple: outsiders come in, figure out what's wrong, and tell the company how to fix it. The premise being that the consultants are smarter and more disciplined than the people who work there.
Jeremy stopped believing it. The clients were just as smart, and they had two things he didn't: they knew how the business actually ran, and they'd be the ones living with whatever got decided. He'd hand over the recommendations and move on. They had to make it work. And there was a simpler problem underneath all of it — nobody likes being told what to do, least of all by an outsider hired to study them.
The pattern pointed somewhere specific: the people who really know how to improve a company are the ones already working inside it, not the experts brought in to analyze them.
Co-founder Terri Long had seen it from the other side of the table. She spent years as a senior executive in corporate banking and first met Jeremy as his client, when her bank brought his team in on an earnings-improvement project. She didn't need convincing that the answers were already inside the building — she'd been the executive sitting on an operation full of them.
They built Idea Harvest™ around the conviction that started it: company insiders, not outside experts, hold the answers, and given the right way to surface them, employees produce hundreds of practical ideas to improve the business.
Eden and Long also went on to write Low-Hanging Fruit: 77 Eye-Opening Ways to Improve Productivity and Profits, the book that laid out the method — proof, in print, of a conviction they'd already spent years testing inside real companies.
HP CEO Lew Platt once said, "If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive." That gap between what a company's people know and what the company can act on is the gap Idea Harvest™ was built to close.
When Harvest Earnings runs an Idea Harvest™ for a client, it follows a few principles that rarely travel together:
It goes to everyone close to the work, not just the confident few who speak up in meetings.
It asks about problems before it asks about solutions. The method didn't always work this way — early on it asked people for ideas directly. The shift came from a realization: not everyone has an idea ready, but everyone knows the problems they hit every day. Ask a service rep what slows them down and you'll hear it right away — that answering one simple customer question means logging into three different systems, and there are a million small frictions just like it. Start from the problems and the solutions come easily. Start from solutions and you get answers to questions nobody was actually asking.
From there, an Idea Harvest™ takes each issue all the way to a decision: the problem itself, what's really driving it, a proposed fix, the numbers worked out and pressure-tested, and — at the end — an approved action with a dollar value and a person assigned to it.
That's the full engagement — roughly 100 days from kickoff to a set of approved ideas — and it's what makes the difference between this and a feedback exercise. A feedback exercise gives you a pile of comments, an Idea Harvest™ gives a client thousands of ideas valued down to the penny, ready to drop into a budget. It doesn't leave a company with decisions to make. It leaves them with decisions already made.
Over a full Harvest Earnings engagement, an Idea Harvest™ does three things for an operation: reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve the customer experience.
What makes it different is how it gets there.
Most cost-cutting initiatives trade one problem for another. Budgets come down, but workloads go up and the customer experience gets worse. The savings are real, but short-term, but the damage is major and long-term.
Idea Harvest™ works the other way, because the people closest to the work can see which steps are genuinely wasted, which approvals add days and nothing else, and which tasks are being done in the wrong place by the wrong people. Cutting that kind of waste lowers cost and lightens the load at the same time.
One retail bank used Idea Harvest™ to eliminate and simplify so much work inside its branches that it could move to an entirely new staffing model: more customer-facing people during peak hours, lower cost overall, and tighter controls. Employees got better jobs and more time for the customer. Customers got served faster.
Most companies put their growth energy into a handful of large bets: new products, new markets, major campaigns. Those get the funding and the attention. Meanwhile, the people in the middle and at the edges of the organization are sitting on hundreds of smaller, practical improvements that are faster to act on, carry less risk, and together can add up to more than the big swings.
The reason those ideas stay buried is reach. In a large company, the people with the sharpest insight are scattered across functions, locations, and shifts.
Idea Harvest™ is built to reach them wherever they sit — across the hallway or across the country — and turn what they know into specific actions to grow revenue.
A service team gets very good at resolving the same issues over and over. But a problem solved well for the hundredth time is still a problem that should never have reached the customer in the first place. The people handling those issues know exactly where they originate, and most of the time it's upstream.
Idea Harvest™ surfaces that knowledge so the problem is prevented instead of being handled more efficiently forever.
That upstream view matters more than it looks. When the back office serves the front line well, the front line is far more likely to deliver a good experience to the people who actually pay you. Designing those internal handoffs well is as important as training the front line, and it's exactly the kind of thing only the people inside the process can see.
Over three decades, Idea Harvest™ has run inside companies in a wide range of industries, including financial institutions, food manufacturing, hotels, electric and gas utilities, grocery and apparel retailers, third-party logistics and operations among others.
It has worked across the entire org chart, from the top floor to the shop floor, from the boardroom to the mailroom.
At large companies, the method reaches enormous scale. Client teams run many conversations in parallel — across functions, locations, and shifts at the same time — and surface thousands of practical ideas in a matter of weeks.
Across those engagements, Harvest Earnings clients have used the method to identify $4.5B+ in earnings improvements — real, approved, dollar-valued ideas, not projections.
The methodology doesn't depend on a particular industry or a particular kind of worker. Wherever there are people close to the work and decision-makers too far from it to see what those people see, Idea Harvest™ has closed the distance.
Every Idea Harvest™ starts the same way: with a conversation — the one that draws a real problem out of someone and shapes it into something specific. For most of the method's life, problems and ideas were gathered manually over 6 weeks.
Tell Jules is a conversational tool the Harvest Earnings team built to run that same kind of opening conversation. They use it inside their own Idea Harvest™ engagements and it's part and parcel of how an Idea Harvest™ works. This new technology enables many more conversations in significantly less time. And because it's a tool rather than a full engagement, they also offer it on its own, to a much wider range of companies and at a lower price.
Tell Jules asks the way the Idea Harvest™ method always has: problems before solutions. It talks to the people closest to the work, in a conversation that takes about 10 minutes, by phone or a link, in virtually any language. It turns what it hears into a clear report: the specific problem, a suggested fix, and the financial questions worth asking before you spend anything.
An Idea Harvest™ is the full, done-for-you methodology designed for Fortune 1000 companies — a 100-day engagement, guided by the Harvest Earnings team, that ends in thousands of valued, approved ideas ready for the budget. Tell Jules is a fast, inexpensive way for a company of nearly any size to get the front end on its own: gather what its people know and get a jumpstart on the analysis.
An Idea Harvest™ ends with the decisions already made. Tell Jules gives you a specific, fast place to start making them — it shows you what your people see and where the opportunities are, so you can decide what's worth chasing and how far to take it, using your current decision-making processes. Or tap the Harvest expertise for help turning ideas into action.
For 30+ years, Idea Harvest™ has proven one thing: the people closest to the work already know what needs to improve, and given the right way to surface it, they're the ones who improve it.
The people who built that method built Tell Jules. See it on one part of your operation, free. Each conversation runs about 10 minutes, by phone or a link, in virtually any language, and comes back as a clear report: the problems your people run into, a suggested fix, and the questions worth asking before you spend anything. There's no IT project and nothing to install.
30+ years in, the method still comes down to one thing: ask the people closest to the work, and they'll show you what they see.
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