Best Buy has an amazing culture of (big word warning:) entrepreneurship. Employees regularly have ideas to drive the business, then they go ahead and make them happen.

(In fact, we have, to a certain extent, institutionalized this effort. In every job description – or at least all the ones I’ve seen – a portion of the job is dedicated to “duties as apparent or assigned.” In large part, this is taken to mean: if you see something that needs to get done, then by all means do it!)

Sometimes the result is small scale – as in, a few employees at one store – and sometimes, it’s a nationwide effort that leverages talent throughout the company. IAmBestBuy and Project Holiday are great examples that showcase these small and large efforts.

Either way, the dilemma is that we don’t have a good way to share all the great stuff that’s happening. Amazing work yields equally amazing results, but most of us – and certainly most of the people that shop with us – just don’t know about it.

This issue has been here for years, and we’ve tried to tackle it in many ways, from huge “Knowledge Management Infrastructure” work to grassroots attempts to just encourage people to tell their stories.

But the issue remains. Incredible stuff is happening all over the place, but it happens in little pockets and never gets to the scale, or the benefits, that should come with being a $40B company. And with over 1000 stores and 150,000 people, it is no wonder that this issue exists.

I really wish I had an answer, one simple solution that would fix this problem. A common idea I’ve heard is to “do less” — that if we have fewer projects going on, then we could all just focus on them and really drive them to success.

This, however, is counter to the very nature of the culture that brought us to this place. If we do less, then someone’s idea isn’t heard. Someone somewhere is told to be quiet and just get with the pre-ordained, fully funded, executive-approved program.

Not only does this sound like a miserable culture, it would just never work at Best Buy. Each of us has a story to tell about something we made happen at work, not because the company told us to, or because it was part of our job description, but because we really cared. And I believe that none of us would give that up, for ourselves or for anyone else. In short, we just value people too much.

That – obviously – is a good thing.

And so, we are left with the dilemma: with all these people doing all this great stuff, how does everyone else find out about it? How do we get the most out of the hard work that each of these people puts forth?

While I don’t have a magic bullet, I would submit that the answer has something to do with social technologies. With sharing. With openness. With networks. With relationships. And yes, with people.

Because the only way we are going to overcome this challenge is through the amazing efforts of the people that created it.