
Getting a great plan past the boss’s desk is hard - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170227-this-is-why-the-boss-will-crush-all-your-good-ideas
======
Animats
A few organizations have tried to deal with this by having multiple people who
can say yes to a new idea.

Or, in California, where overreaching IP terms in employment contracts are
illegal, you can leave and take your new idea somewhere else, which is why
Silicon Valley is here.

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hkmurakami
Basically it's the complex enterprise sales process with multiple
stakeholders. Doesn't matter if you're inside or outside the organization. You
still have to sell your idea/product through this sometimes opaque process.

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arethuza
I've found that timing can be very important - don't try and force new ideas
of people when they aren't receptive, keep your ideas fresh and then when
there is a moment of crisis and/or demand then come forward and present your
ideas and you can get a very different response.

~~~
osullivj
Yes, timing is critical. Also finding an influential senior supporter who will
sway your immediate boss. Your immediate boss has their own deliverables,
deadlines and career and reputational concerns to manage, and your bright new
idea may be seen as a threat to all that. Purely technical arguments won't win
the day; it's necessary to understand the organisational politics. Which comes
down to "managing upwards", something many technical people don't do, and
don't understand that they need to do to make an impact in large hierarchical
orgs. I know it took me a long time to understand these factors.

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Philomath
At Nokia there is no frontiers to innovation, they just released the game
changing 3310. A true example of listening to people's ideas.

~~~
nul_byte
I was reading this while remembering my time at Nokia and how I gave up
putting ideas forward because of so much bureaucracy and political infighting.
The few times my ideas got traction they were whole sale lifted into other
products with zero credit going to myself.

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pif
Most important sentence, IMHO:

> “The moment you focus on short-term profits, and not long-term revenues, you
> put handcuffs on innovation.”

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hive_mind
the essence: ultimately, what people care about is, "what's in it for them."

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napo
I like to think that if your idea is truly good: It's your responsability to
gather data, calculate metrics, do small tests and to find an iterative and
lean way to implement it. It's hard, and in reallity intuition in itself can
be quite powerful, but in a company it's all about measuring what is the best
next move.

~~~
halomru
That sounds much closer to the definition of management than to my job
description.

~~~
inlined
I find that most engineers overestimate the portion of their job that can be
satisfied by technical skill alone. Dale Carnegie states in the preface of
"How to win Friends and Influence People" that even in fields as technical as
engineering only 15% of job success is purely technical.

If you have a truly good idea--one you think should go up the management chain
--how much are you willing to handcuff yourself by your job description? Fwiw,
I've always interpreted the vague "technical leadership" parts of senior eng
job descriptions to encompass exactly this. Leading people is a lot more than
just telling them where to go.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
If you've ever worked within a company and also done cold sales for a startup
you would have discovered this inertia is commonplace whether you're making
suggestions inside or from outside. I've spent time researching people as
prospects in key posts where they are basically responsible for looking at
better ways of doing things, contacted them only to have them either not reply
or say 'not interested' without seeing what I'm even talking about. There are
innovators around, just not the majority.

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perseusprime11
Can somebody define great? I like how the article talks about this whole thing
without validating what great means.

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known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#Examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#Examples)
that overcame
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias)

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f_allwein
"Your idea is far more likely to die on your boss’s desk than it is to reach
the CEO."

Exception to the rule: Tim Betners-Lee's boss, who wrote "vague, but exciting"
on the proposal of the World Wide Web.
[http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html](http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html)

~~~
icebraining
The CERN doesn't have a CEO, though.

