[Torcs-ng-devel] Interesting quote about management and innovation

[Keith C. <ke...@gm...>]

I'm reading a book by Gary Hamel called "The Future of Management", and I
found some interesting words that somewhat correlate to what we are
discussing.

Kind regards,

-Keith
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"Sometimes the real hurdle to renewal is not a lack of options, but a lack
of flexibility in resource allocation. All too often, legacy projects get
richly funded year after year while new initiatives go begging. This, more
than anything, is why companies regularly forfeit the future -- they over
invest in 'what is' at the expense of 'what could be.'
New projects are deemed 'untested', 'risky', or a 'diversion of resources.'
Thus while senior execs may happily fund a billion-dollar acquisition,
someone a few levels down who attempts to 'borrow' a half-dozen talented
individuals for a new project, or carve a few thousand dollars out of a
legacy budget, is likely to find the task on par with a dental extraction.
The resource allocation model is typically biased against new ideas, since
it demands a level of certainty about volumes, costs, timelines, and profits
that simply can't be satisfied when an ideal is truly novel. While it's easy
to predict the returns on a project that is a linear extension of an
existing business, the payback on an unconventional idea will be harder to
calculate.
Managers running established businesses seldom have to defend the strategic
risk they take when they pour good money into a slowly decaying business
model, or overfund an activity that is already producing diminishing
returns."

One of the questions they ask: "How do you accelerate the redeployment of
resources from legacy programs to future-focused initiatives?"