Talk:OpenRacing

Removed this from the main page, but I like this quote, so I'm putting it here:

Quote from Gary Hamel, The Future of Management:

Sometimes the real hurdle to renewal is not a lack of options, but a lack of flexibility in resource allocation. All too often, legacy projects get richly funded year after year while new initiatives go begging. This, more than anything, is why companies regularly forfeit the future -- they over invest in "what is" at the expense of "what could be."

New projects are deemed "untested", "risky", or a "diversion of resources." Thus while senior execs may happily fund a billion-dollar acquisition, someone a few levels down who attempts to "borrow" a half-dozen talented individuals for a new project, or carve a few thousand dollars out of a legacy budget, is likely to find the task on par with a dental extraction.

The resource allocation model is typically biased against new ideas, since it demands a level of certainty about volumes, costs, timelines, and profits that simply can't be satisfied when an ideal is truly novel. While it's easy to predict the returns on a project that is a linear extension of an existing business, the payback on an unconventional idea will be harder to calculate.

Managers running established businesses seldom have to defend the strategic risk they take when they pour good money into a slowly decaying business model, or overfund an activity that is already producing diminishing returns.

How do you accelerate the redeployment of resources from legacy programs to future-focused initiatives?