Leading Organizational Learning

Chapter Ten

The Company as a Marketplace

for Ideas: Simple but Not Easy

Alexander J. Ogg

Thomas Cummings

Every business leader we know struggles with how best to leverage
the size and scope of his or her organization; this is particularly true
of individuals who manage large multinationals. Whether they
work locally and have to pay “corporate taxes” or they work at the
corporate center and need to “justify their existence,” the questions
are “How do we take advantage of ‘bigness’ to compete with
smaller competitors?” and “How do we benefit from ‘early informa-
tion’ to move as fast as or faster than our more nimble adversaries?”
We believe that there are three important things that can be
leveraged in large companies to help take advantage of being a big
organization: money, talent, and ideas.
Essentially, big organizations can almost always bring more
money, better talent, and stronger ideas to the “point of attack.”
Unfortunately, all too often the same “bigness” that creates advan-
tages also creates barriers to getting either enough money, the right
talent, or the best ideas to the right places at the right time to win.
As leaders, we need to adopt an “efficient market” perspective for
our organizations if we hope to overcome the barriers.
It is our experience that business leaders need to create “effi-
cient markets” for money, ideas, and talent in their organizations.
That is to say, managers must systematically identify and eliminate
the major barriers that prevent ideas, talent, and money from
flowing easily to the point of “highest and best use.”^1 Most of us

103