CEO backing helps, but making one project the favored pet kills it. You can't fail safely or pivot when the boss has already crowned a winner. Better to fund a portfolio of bets and let evidence decide which ones survive.
Chapters
Here's an interesting thing. Okay, so we often are telling people that they should get support from the CEO. But actually what we want is the right kind of support. The worst thing that can happen to you is to be the CEO's pet innovation project. Because if you're the CEO's pet innovation project, you no longer have the space to test your ideas and fail. Once the CEO puts a stamp on your project, it's pretty cool because it opens doors that weren't open before, but now you kind of stuck in this sort of condemned to succeed kind of state where you can't really iterate, you can't test, you can't pivot, you can't go back to the CEO and say, the idea sucks. We have to stop. And so even though we want leadership support, we want the right kind of support for innovation. CEOs should never have a pet innovation project. What CEOs should have is a pet innovation portfolio where they're making multiple bets in a lot of ideas and then allowing those teams to test those ideas and then like stopping some ideas when the evidence shows that those ideas are not succeeding and doubling down investment on those ideas that are actually showing progress and traction. Like that really matters. So no pet projects? Pet innovation portfolios? Sure. Even pet innovation strategies? Sure. But not a single project could this be possible to to pick the winning idea on day one.
