[solatic]

Author clearly has no understanding of why startups move quickly. Startups have the same Legal, Procurement, Security, etc. needs and responsibilities as any large company or government agency - its just that these responsibilities are looked after by generalist founder-executives, not whole departments filled with specialists. Any "innovation department", if it ever wants to actually ship anything, still needs to get BigBureaucracy on board, which is where the vast majority of time gets eaten up to ship anything. Startups don't need buy-in and alignment from whole departments full of specialists, just the executive-founders with unrelated titles and experience who are still nonetheless nominally responsible for those areas.

> what we just witnessed was leadership rewarding and perpetuating a dysfunctional and broken system.

Leadership's first responsibility is to keep the system happy and running smoothly. The first responsibility is not to shareholders, not to attempting to seize potentially higher profits, but to the organization itself. The organization may be "dysfunctional" and "broken" but this is completely irrelevant - the Fortune 500 is still generating massive profits and the public institution is still nominally discharging its duties. This is why the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs are "caretaker" CEOs and why deep cultural change of public institutions is so difficult.

Culture is fundamentally a question of who you hire, who you promote, and who you fire. Those decisions do not happen overnight in healthy organizations. That's why it's slow.

[smugglerFlynn]

Some orgs of Fortune 500 caliber have innovation units that help to process ideas and changes. To be efficient, these units must have buy in on senior leadership level and high level of exec sponsorship, ideally they would also have C-level representation in a form of dedicated “innovation officer” or similar role.

It is definitely not a new area, and author is on point with one key idea: organisations where heroes are praised as miracles generally don’t give a damn about continuous improvement, innovation units just never happen there. Praising individuals who swam against the flow for a year is pure virtue signalling in these orgs. In 2024 “running things smoothly” is almost a synonym for “continuous improvement”; building latter requires intent, not miracles.

[pdonis]

> Author clearly has no understanding of why startups move quickly.

He also appears to have no understanding of why government agencies and large corporations don't have to. Multiple times he says that such organizations need an innovation strategy or they will be out-competed. But government agencies and large corporations (which are mainly large because of the advantages of being large in an environment heavily regulated by government) don't have to worry about being out-competed, because they have insulated themselves from competition.