Your Company Is Suffocating Your Best Ideas. Here's Why.

Picture this: You're sitting in a conference room. The whiteboard says "DREAM BIG" in enthusiastic marker. Your boss just said the words every innovation team dreads: "There are no bad ideas here."

Except there are. And everyone knows it.

You have an idea—a genuinely bold one that could change everything. But you're not sharing it. Why? Because you've done the math. If you propose this idea and it actually gets approved, congratulations: you just gave yourself a second job with zero additional resources and a high probability of public failure.

So you keep your mouth shut. You suggest something incremental instead. Something safe. Something that won't require you to work nights and weekends for the next six months only to watch it die a slow death in the "idea graveyard" along with every other bold proposal that made it past the brainstorming phase.

This is what Elvin Turner calls being a "corporate zombie." And if you're honest with yourself, you'll recognize it immediately.

The Big Idea Myth

I recently talked to Elvin, who spent years going into companies and hearing the same complaint from executives: "We need more innovation. It's just not showing up."

Except when he actually looked around, he found innovation everywhere.

The problem wasn't a lack of innovation. It was a lack of *the right kind* of innovation.

Everyone was executing incremental improvements—the kind of innovation that keeps you in the game but doesn't change it. The big idea cupboard, as the executives put it, was empty.

And here's the uncomfortable truth they didn't want to hear: The reason the big idea cupboard was empty is because their organization was built to kill big ideas before they could fully form.

Elvin discovered this when he put the words "be less zombie" into an anagram generator just for fun. The first result? "Blob seizes me."

That's exactly what was happening. The blob of status quo was grabbing hold of bold ideas and crushing them before they could take their first breath.

The Two Diseases Killing Your Innovation

Elvin identified two phenomena that explain why bold ideas never make it out alive. And they're both rooted in fear, even though most companies will deny fear exists in their culture.

First: Creative Constipation

People have bold ideas. They're just too terrified to let them out.

There are two reasons. One: "I'm gonna look stupid if I propose this and challenge the status quo, and that's not good for my career."

Two: "Even if my boss says yes, I've just given myself an evening job. There's no time for this during regular hours, and I don't want to work nights for the privilege of failing publicly."

So the ideas that the future actually needs from us stay locked inside people's heads. Unshared. Unexplored. Dead on arrival.

Second: Creative Indigestion

Let's say you're brave enough—or naive enough—to actually share a bold idea. Congratulations. Now your organization has to figure out what to do with it.

Except the system isn't designed to handle ideas that have no budget, no team, and no proven ROI. Bold ideas don't fit neatly into quarterly planning cycles or resource allocation spreadsheets.

So the system can't digest them. It tries for a while, gets heartburn, and eventually spits them out.

The idea dies. Not because it was bad. But because the organizational immune system identified it as a foreign object and rejected it.

The Culture Calibration Problem

Here's where most companies get it completely wrong.

They want extraordinary ideas to emerge from ordinary contexts.

Elvin quotes a philosopher from the 1960s who defined culture as "what is ordinary"—the normal ways of thinking and working. How we do things around here.

But executives are asking for *extra*ordinary ideas while maintaining a culture optimized for ordinary work. That's like asking a fish to climb a tree and then wondering why it's not succeeding.

Left to their own devices, behaviors follow the path of least resistance. And the path of least resistance in most organizations is to do what you did yesterday, just slightly better.

Trying to fit bold innovation into a business-as-usual context is fantasy.

The companies that actually get bold innovation? They don't have one culture. They calibrate culture to the outcome they need.

Take Google. The mothership—Alphabet and its established lines of business—has a culture optimized for execution and profitability. You won't see a lot of high-stakes risk-taking there, because that's not appropriate.

But go to Google X, where Astro Teller runs what's essentially a pirate ship. They openly celebrate 99% failure rates. That's not an accident. They've deliberately calibrated the culture to make the path of least resistance point toward bold experimentation.

One company. Two completely different cultures. Both right for what they're trying to achieve.

Most companies try to have one culture and wonder why they can't get both incremental optimization *and* bold innovation. You can't. You have to choose which behaviors you're optimizing for, and then design the environment to make those behaviors easy.

The Question You're Not Asking

Elvin discovered something else that stuck with me: What we do today limits what we can imagine for tomorrow.

Status quo is like corporate chloroform. It dulls our imagination until we literally can't conceive of anything beyond what we do today.

You see this in brainstorms constantly. "Dream big!" everyone says. And then the ideas that emerge are just... bigger versions of what you're already doing.

Ask customers for the next big thing? They can't do it either. They're trapped in the same status quo box you are.

The solution isn't to try harder to "think outside the box." It's to deliberately design questions that break through the ceiling of what feels possible.

Elvin calls these "catalytic questions." Here's how they work:

First, you name the assumptions. What are the rules of the game as you currently understand them? What dependencies do you believe have to be in place?

Just the act of naming them often makes you realize: Wait, why *do* we do it like that?

Then you mess with them. Challenge them. Break them on purpose.

Instead of asking "How can we create more growth for this product?"—which is vague and usually generates incremental ideas—you ask: "How can we increase this specific dimension of customer progress by 10%?" Or: "What would a 10x return look like here?"

You're calibrating the question to the outcome you actually want.

And here's the part most leaders miss: Before you ask people for 10x ideas, you need to be ready to sponsor 10x ideas. Because if you ask for bold thinking and then get cold feet when people actually deliver it, you've just taught everyone that boldness is punished.

Questions aren't just conversation starters. They're a leadership commitment.

The Love Paradox

I have to share one more insight from Elvin's book, because it perfectly captures the contradiction we all live with.

Everyone in innovation says: "Don't fall in love with your ideas."

Elvin says the opposite: You *should* fall in love with your ideas.

Here's why both are right.

Most people who say "don't fall in love with your ideas" are actually talking about *infatuation*. That blind, teenage-style obsession where you can't think straight. That's dangerous. That's how you waste two years on something the market clearly doesn't want.

But here's the thing: In most organizations, you *need* passion to push an idea through. You're going into an environment that's doing everything it can to kill or water down your idea. If you don't care deeply—if you're not in love with the problem you're solving—you won't survive the bureaucratic gauntlet.

Why would you choose a life of pain if you don't care enough to fight for it?

The distinction Elvin makes is this: Most organizations have a dating attitude toward innovation. It's casual. A fling. A campaign here and there. But not an ongoing commitment.

In a marriage, love is often a choice, not a feeling. You don't always *feel* like doing the right thing. But you choose to do it anyway because you've made a commitment.

Love knows when to push forward and when to let go. It looks at the bigger picture.

Infatuation is blind. Love has 20/20 vision.

If you're going to push bold ideas through a system designed to reject them, you need love—the kind that's grounded in reality, informed by feedback, and willing to let go when the evidence says it's time.

But you also need the passion to fight when the evidence says keep going.

It's not about being detached. It's about being clear-eyed.

What This Actually Means

You're probably not going to redesign your entire organization's culture tomorrow. Most people won't.

But here's what you can do:

Stop pretending fear doesn't exist in your organization. It does. Creative constipation and creative indigestion are both symptoms of fear. Name it. Talk about it. Make it safe to acknowledge.

Stop asking for extraordinary ideas while maintaining ordinary conditions. If you want bold innovation, you have to create the space for it. Different rules. Different metrics. Different expectations.

Design your questions deliberately. Don't leave it to chance. Be specific about what outcome you want, and be ready to sponsor the answers you get.

And if you're an innovator working inside a system that feels like it's suffocating your best ideas—fall in love with the problem. Not in an infatuation way. In a "I choose to care about this even when it's hard" way.

Because here's the truth Elvin uncovered: The organizations that actually innovate boldly don't do it by accident. They make a choice.

They recognize that innovation is an argument with the status quo. They know they're going to be wrong a lot. They know it's going to be messy. They know it's scary.

And they do it anyway.

Because the future is going to show up whether you're ready or not. The only question is: Are you going to be caught out by it, or are you going to be ready?

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Want the Full Story?

Elvin Turner's book Be Less Zombie is one of those rare innovation books that's actually practical. No jargon. No fluff. Just the how-to manual most companies desperately need.

And if you want to hear the full conversation—including why leaders need to count the cost before asking catalytic questions and what Google X does that most companies miss—listen to Yaniv Corem's interview with Elvin on The School of Innovation podcast.

Because here's the thing about being a corporate zombie: Everyone knows it's happening. Very few people are willing to do what it takes to wake up.

The question is: Are you?