Every organization wants to innovate, right? Not just once, but over and over again. And judging from the conversations I have with CEOs, most feel they cannot accomplish this. They look inward, they wonder, am I smart enough? Am I clever enough? Can I compete with genius founders when actually it's not so much about individual brilliance, but about creating an environment where good ideas can be surfaced and tested and ultimately put into action?
People can "win" internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So "fighting for the best idea" becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor's—er, boss's—opinions.
The history of the craftsmanship economy is littered with the ruins of fashion houses which lost their creative soul through founder absence, over-licensing, or managerial drift - as seen at once-iconic examples such as Halston, Pierre Cardin, Liz Claiborne, and Kate Spade - and internal turbulence (Gucci), as well as unsuccessful conglomeration efforts which proved incapable of preserving creative genius at scale.
In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer.
When Everett Rogers introduced the S-shaped diffusion curve in the first edition of his book, he was directly following the data. Researchers like Elihu Katz had already begun studying how change spreads and noticed a consistent pattern in the adoption of hybrid corn and the antibiotic tetracycline. Yet it was Rogers who shaped our understanding of how ideas spread. Publishing more than 30 books and 500 articles, he studied everything from technology adoption to family planning in remote societies.