I think this is a correlation/causation problem. Almost no companies have managed to keep its culture of innovation intact after going public, ergo going public implies death of innovation.
What I think is missed is that most companies fail, culturally, before they go public. However, when they're ramping up to IPO, they're putting lots of lipstick on the pig, and no employee wants to say anything contrary for fear of getting canned before a major cash-out.
Innovation requires freedom to fail without losing professional status. It requires autonomy for the kinds of people that, in a big company, the CEO will never have heard of. It requires open allocation, at least for the people who are expected to be innovating. See: http://www.quora.com/Software-Development-Methodologies/What...
Most startups begin with a constrained open allocation. You can't work on "whatever you want" because it's driving toward MVP, product-market fit, and profitability... but any work that is part of the company's mission (and there's plenty of work to do) is fair game for anyone. So the division of labor is pretty much rankless. However, at some point between 15 and 200 employees, most companies close up their project allocation, which means you need to play politics to get assigned to real work.
Innovation dies when you go to closed allocation-- you get a caste of entitled, permanent managers who control the division of labor, and use that control toward their own ends (including self-perpetuation). Now, the focus of the individual people is on (a) controlling the division of labor, and (b) getting what they can in terms of job titles in event of exit. The environment becomes so political that people can no longer do real work without shutting themselves away, which usually leads to getting fired.
I think open allocation is a key focus which derives from "Management as servant leaders" which is very rarely the case in many organizations (not just big ones).
I've seen plenty of small startups where the CEO-as-king was taken quite literally ("Change the icons to cornflower blue").
Ultimately open allocation comes from a view that upper management (provided you're not Steve Jobs) are not the "deciders" any more than everyone else are. "We should do X because I said so" no longer happens because that's not in your company DNA. Yes, I suppose there will be a stratification of those who can lead and those who can't (as you've written about) but isn't that how it should be?
Once you get around that, awesome things tend to happen. Which is why companies that can do that will continue to kick the crap out of those that can't.
What I think is missed is that most companies fail, culturally, before they go public. However, when they're ramping up to IPO, they're putting lots of lipstick on the pig, and no employee wants to say anything contrary for fear of getting canned before a major cash-out.
Innovation requires freedom to fail without losing professional status. It requires autonomy for the kinds of people that, in a big company, the CEO will never have heard of. It requires open allocation, at least for the people who are expected to be innovating. See: http://www.quora.com/Software-Development-Methodologies/What...
Most startups begin with a constrained open allocation. You can't work on "whatever you want" because it's driving toward MVP, product-market fit, and profitability... but any work that is part of the company's mission (and there's plenty of work to do) is fair game for anyone. So the division of labor is pretty much rankless. However, at some point between 15 and 200 employees, most companies close up their project allocation, which means you need to play politics to get assigned to real work.
Innovation dies when you go to closed allocation-- you get a caste of entitled, permanent managers who control the division of labor, and use that control toward their own ends (including self-perpetuation). Now, the focus of the individual people is on (a) controlling the division of labor, and (b) getting what they can in terms of job titles in event of exit. The environment becomes so political that people can no longer do real work without shutting themselves away, which usually leads to getting fired.