Godfried Donkor ® c/o 1957 Gallery (London)

The way business bets are structured, as you push responsibility and accountability further down the organisation, people become more risk-averse and more uncertainty-averse. You become more worried about downside avoidance than upside opportunity. As a result, both innovation and marketing are fat-tailed activities, where 10% of what you do is probably more valuable than everything else combined. And you can’t tell in advance which 10% it’s going to be, they are processes of exploration and discovery.

What organisations do, in pursuit of efficiency, is eliminate that discovery layer. In the short term, it looks like a great idea. In the long term, I think it proves fatal, because you lose the ability to adapt, reinvent and reposition in pursuit of the occasional breakthrough. What do you think?