The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.4. A True Story—Mostly

The following story is mostly true. I can't tell you the names of the companies involved, but you can guess. There will be no prizes for guessing right, but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that even humongous companies with legions of planners, strategists, and business analysts make mistakes that your great-grandmother would never have made.

A few years back, an extremely large global technology supplier saw an opportunity to tear off and swallow a huge chunk of the market for Internet routers. The plan was simple: They would simply overwhelm the competition by throwing vast resources into new product development, marketing, and sales.

The leading maker of routers at that time was not a small company. But it wasn't nearly as large as the global technology supplier that had fixed its hungry eye on the router market.

The company that made routers had more collective experience and deeper knowledge of the market than any potential competitor. But the company had a weakness: it had no formal company-wide standards for testing the new software that it developed for its routers and other innovative products.

For years the developers at this company had enjoyed a sense of cowboy-like freedom, largely unhampered by rules or anything else that they imagined might have restricted their creativity.

The company paid a steep price for all of this unbridled creativity. It took forever to get their pioneering products and services out the door and into the ...