Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

2.2. Harnessing the Fleas

Elephants need fleas such as these to keep them innovating, but fleas cannot easily live in elephants. The inevitable bureaucracy and need for conformity suffocates them, be they individuals or groups. Some organizations put their fleas in separate pens, in what used to be called skunk works, only to find, too often, that their innovative ideas are then rejected by the core organization as "not invented here." In a variation of this tactic, some elephant organizations set out to buy successful flea organizations and then incorporate their innovations into their own workings, meanwhile spitting out the original flea creator, who finds corporate life intolerable after independence. Others have turned a part of themselves ...