working in large organizations have experienced the frustration of
knowing we have better talent, the financial resources, or the best
idea somewhere in our organization but are unable to find it or free
it up in time to help us win. The popular business press is full of sto-
ries that describe how leaders have taken on the barriers to efficient
internal markets—Cisco’s open job posting; the way GE Capital
moves money to high-leverage businesses; the approaches Intel,
Cannon, or 3M use to generate ideas for manufacturing and new
products, or the way Shell moves its stock of international talent
across the world. In this chapter, we draw on our own experiences
to focus specifically on just one of these key drivers of leverage:
creating an efficient marketplace for ideas.
An Idea MarketplaceA market is made up of buyers, sellers, and brokers; there are effi-
cient markets and there are inefficient ones. If we consider real
estate markets for a moment, they are generally very efficient.
Knowledge of buyers, sellers, and brokers is readily available. The
value of a particular piece of real estate is fairly easy to determine
at fair market rates, there are lots of safeguards to ensure that
transactions go smoothly, and there are sanctions for not playing by
the rules.
In contrast, the market for knowledge and ideas in most orga-
nizations is highly inefficient. Unlike our real estate example, the
right “sellers” are difficult to locate and can be hard to get to even
if we know where they work. It is nearly impossible to establish the
right “price,” because we have no clear way to establish the value
of the idea or knowledge we are “buying,” and different parts of
the organization often play using different rules.
There are many reasons why our internal markets for ideas are
so inefficient. We will focus on only a few of the most damaging
and suggest that unless leaders work on these sources of inefficiency,
the marketplace for ideas will not flourish.
104 LEADINGORGANIZATIONALLEARNING