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The room is hot, not from the weather but from pressure. It is Monday morning, 9:07 am, and the executive committee is reviewing a proposal that everyone agrees is “brilliant.” New revenue line, strong margins, low capital requirement.
The intern who built the model is glowing. The long-serving manager is nodding slowly, protecting his territory. The CEO is impatient, pushing for quick approval. Then the internal auditor asks a question: “Who will kill their current work to make this succeed?”
The idea is sound, the numbers hold, and the board will love it. But nobody owns the sacrifice. The organisation is a crowded bus; everyone is trying to get on, nobody is willing to get off. And so the idea joins the pile; approved, celebrated, and quietly abandoned under operational pressure.
Most leaders believe good ideas fail because of poor execution. That is lazy thinking. Good ideas die because of incentive misalignment and capacity denial. You reward people for maintaining the current machine, then ask them to disrupt it in their spare time. You call it innovation. They call it career risk. “An idea without protected capacity is already dead.”.. READ MORE |