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The innovators exile
When old dogma causes old dogs to die.
I was lamenting recently that, regarding innovation, old companies just don’t want to hear it.
But let’s use Clayton Christensen’s euphemism, “Great Firms.” Maybe he meant “great” as in the self-anointed “greatest generation,” who were also those firms’ founders; or maybe he meant it like the classic dog eulogy, “he wasn’t a good dog, but he was a great dog.”
Maybe he was just being nice, or maybe he didn’t want to bite the hands that fed him with lucrative consulting contracts.
My lament was that even when pitching innovation to my CEO (in a privileged leadership position in which I had such an opportunity), in the face of stalled and declining growth, with younger competitors flying past in growth and market share, and with the best team possible to accomplish said innovations, bar none, I was still met with a, “hmmmm… nah, we’re just gonna hunker down now and stay the course.”
To me this was akin to a ship captain saying he would go down with the sinking ship while his chief engineer is saying, “no, but we can fix the leak in the hull, and we can improve the engine… and we can survive.”
“Hmmmm… nah.”
But then my interlocutor gifted me this insight (I do wish I could take credit), that old…
