Ideas Don't Die, Companies Do. And What HR Can Do About It.
Unimaginative Leaders are the greatest threat to the future of your company and our world.
This article is an amended version of the original printed in TheHRDirector September 2025 print & digital issue. | Download the full edition.
Being at the speed of an idea calls for a nuanced, complex, multi-disciplinary mindset that is hard to develop yet so critical to success. But it begins with the hard realization: true agility means that ideas are more valuable to your future than today’s customers. Are you willing to disrupt yourself? Why would you do it? And what does it take?
At the speed of ideas is the new age agility
From now on, we will always be in a state where the unknows are greater than the knowns. And I believe the only way to lead through this is in exploring ideas to find solutions for a world yet to be fully discovered.
Each decade life changes. And when a momentous shift takes place, we call it historic or once in a lifetime. We are now in a period where such ‘once in a lifetime events’ occur each year. This reshapes many of our assumptions in our lives and at our work. Further, the AI debate disproportionately focuses on job redundancies and reconfiguring work as we know it. In addition, this gets clouded by an endless stream of job layoff news over the past 18 months, especially in the US, in great part attributed to productivity gains from AI.
And despite all the technology developed and available, companies continue to have significant challenges to overcome and, in this pressure, missing out some brilliant opportunities to reimagine themselves.
How did we get here? Over the past twenty-five years of digital transformations, we have put customer-obsession as the gold standard for businesses. And in this process, I believe we have lost out on the real value that we as humans bring to the world – ideas. Our obsession with technology driven habits has forced us into mechanical workplaces still driven by old world order productivity thinking and low paying jobs. The companies that were customer-obsessed become efficiency and productivity focused - faster, better, cheaper. companies that were innovative to a point tipped over to become operationally mundane.
The shift from customer-obsession to ideas-obsession rewires everything we know about how products and organizations are built.
Companies often outlive their relevance by clinging to existing products, expertise, and ingrained cultures. They fail to adapt to disruptive ideas from outside their industry. Companies are fragile, but ideas are inherently resilient and can adapt and diffuse, even if their originators fail.
Companies that lack imaginative leaders are trapped and in a state of continuous fatigue.
Is Your Company in a Trap?
Ideas, in their purest form, are imaginative and fragile, requiring leadership, culture, and resources to thrive. Yet, the best ideas frequently fail not due to market rejection or competitor actions, but at the hands of a company's own leaders and internal structures. This internal "death" of ideas stems from four interconnected "entrapment blocks" that lead to corporate stagnation and eventual demise.
If you see your company in any of these four entrapment blocks, you know you have an ‘ideas-leader’ problem.
If your company is any of the four entrapment blocks, you will experience the following:
Losing margins: This occurs when companies fail to deliver simple, intuitive customer experiences and exhibit poor design practices. Dissatisfaction leads to increased customer churn, escalated support costs, and reduced conversion rates, eroding profit margins and diminishing perceived value.
Losing speed to market: Organizational bureaucracy, characterized by hierarchical structures and numerous approvals, coupled with managers' low-risk quotients, stifles innovation. This inertia delays decision-making and prevents swift market responsiveness, resulting in missed opportunities.
Losing growth: A risk-averse leadership team and a culture that discourages rapid execution leading to stagnation. Leaders' fear of failure and overemphasis on proven methods stifle experimentation and delay bold initiatives, causing companies to miss critical market breakthroughs and competitive differentiation.
Losing the future: Fragmented data, scattered across disparate systems, and technology too slow to adapt or catch up, compromise decision-making, customer experience, and innovation. This prevents companies from leveraging insights or pivoting quickly, making them vulnerable in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
HR Leaders are best positioned to break a company out of its entrapment. But they can only do this by nurturing, rewarding and retaining ideas-centric leaders.
What do ideas-centric enterprises do differently?
1. Building unnatural or dissimilar capabilities
To be ideas-centric, companies must develop capabilities outside their core expertise, breaking industry molds and redefining market expectations. This involves companies identifying and developing capabilities that are not natural to their existing state of business or industry. Building unnatural capabilities requires a combination of strategic vision, cultural change, and a willingness to embrace new technologies and ideas.
Building unnatural or dissimilar capabilities involves acquiring and developing an entirely new set of methods, processes, skills, models, and approaches that are not inherent or "natural" to a company's existing state of business or industry. This goes beyond mere adjacencies or extensions of current operations.
Each time a company must change, it needs to build capabilities that are unnatural or dissimilar to its state of business. The ‘unnatural’ or ‘dissimilar’ aspect of it creates resistance to change as it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
The primary purpose of brilliant HR Business Partnership is to identify, articulate, shape and build these unnatural or dissimilar capabilities.
Today, we see companies in multiple, concurrent loops of change. We still have traditional linear manufacturing firms in basic enterprise technology implementations, we have companies in next level of digital with customer applications, followed by companies on a journey to become Cloud natives, and now with companies on an AI transformation journey. Today, it is entirely possible that a company could be in all four of these stages at once.
Every idea to be brought to life needs the company to build a set of capabilities that are not natural to their state of business. And this needs HR Leadership that has multi-disciplinary exposure, inter-connected thinking.
2. Moving intelligence
Moving intelligence is the competitive advantage for companies in a digital world. Now as AI commoditizes knowledge, this becomes critical to the success of any company. Moving or transplanting an idea is good but there is a nuanced difference when I explain it; moving intelligence is about moving the learnings from applying an idea across different contexts fast enough.
Companies that innovate, excel at moving intelligence. This is where their speed comes from. They can retain and organize the learnings. And move this intelligence to test different ideas as they arise.
Companies spend disproportionate amounts of time on fragmented knowledge (both formal and informal) and look at points to capture this rather than focus on networks that use and multiply it (internal and external).
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a transformative era, redefining how intelligence is conceptualized, distributed, and applied. The concept of "moving intelligence" refers to the dynamic shift in where and how decision-making and computational capabilities are deployed, particularly in the context of AI-powered systems.
Moving intelligence is a capability - the ability to bring together disparate sets of ideas, information, cultures, technologies, and areas to build the future for a company. But this does not happen unless there is conscious focus on assembling, organizing and storing, un-connected, multi-everything pieces of knowledge.
3. Choosing Purpose Over Culture
Ideas-centric companies and leaders replace the word culture with purpose in their conversations.
Companies, in their pride and adherence to deeply ingrained cultural norms, allow culture to override the necessity for sound business strategy, leading to stagnation, missed opportunities. Unlike culture, which needs to be dynamic and constantly evolve to reflect the shifting landscapes of customer expectations, industry trends, and technological advancements, purpose is more permanent and must be deeply understood. It is this enduring, clear purpose that should fundamentally drive a company's methods, processes, behaviors, and habits.
‘This is how we do things’ has led to many a company go bankrupt.
If leaders and managers are spending most of their time discussing culture as commonly understood, it is a sign of trouble. In contrast, successful companies consistently prioritize and discuss their purpose, fostering a strong, commonly understood direction that then informs and directs their operational conduct. This contrasts with legacy, which is described as a liability that keeps a company from moving with the times, including elements like complexity and poor design.
‘This is how we do things’ has led to many a company go bankrupt. ‘This is why we need to do it this way’ has made enterprises disrupt industries. To build ideas-centric enterprise, you need to override your today’s culture with tomorrow’s purpose, fast.
Rewiring HR To Build Ideas-Centric Enterprises
The past few years has seen the HR Function come under pressure from multiple socio-economic-political friction points: The abrupt scramble to work from home during Covid turning to return to office mandates, diversity, inclusion & equity becoming a politically divisive debate and AI & Automation.
It is time for HR to reset. So how can HR shift from the noise to the signal in building new-age enterprises?
1. CHRO role must have the same reward approach as that of a Chief Innovation Officer
You know a great CHRO when you see that person at every idea’s discussion in the company. And this does not come naturally for the way we have been taught to be a HR Leader is no longer relevant. An AI-Native Era CHRO is in equal part a growth and innovation officer for the company. In this role, you are not in a ringside seat, you are in the ring.
This requires a mindset shift and to be fully immersed in emerging technologies, develop a deep understanding of customers, be able to see round the corners and anticipate disruptive changes. A CHROs actions directly impact building unnatural capabilities to win and to be ahead of the industry curve.
Therefore, the expectation and reward for a CHRO should be similar to and overlap with the elements from the roles of Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Design Officer, Chief Knowledge Officer and Chief Transformation Officer.
2. HR should design, create and anchor knowledge management for the company
HR is a unique position that cuts across the organization in all dimensions: by layers, by markets, by key decisions on people, by performance and business planning. In the shift of HR role in creating an ideas-centric enterprise, it is vital that HR owns the knowledge management approach for the company. This is not to be confused with enterprise data architecture or enterprise systems.
I explain it as Eureka-ism: The ability to bring together disparate ideas, information, cultures, and technologies to build the future for a company. This requires a conscious focus on assembling, organizing, and storing "unconnected, multi-everything pieces of knowledge".
This is done through a combination of approaches: Driven through institutional systemic approach, enabled through informal networks or influencers with a set of loosely federated principles, dependent on the self-initiative of individual managers, teams or employees and enabled by technology accessible to all employees, ingrained into daily lives to capture ideas.
3. 70% of HR members should not have job descriptions (30% are geographic, functionally aligned or service teams).
HR Function needs to reshape itself to be at the speed of ideas. This requires a different set of skillsets and not that of HR itself. It needs T-shaped business professionals – with wide degree of multi-disciplinary exposure on the top combined with strong problem solving, design thinking and project management skills.
This will position the function to work with business teams at all levels, functions, divisions or markets on building new ideas, solving problems and moving intelligence.
Today, HR is unable to solve big complex problems within its own function, e.g. we know that the talent acquisition approach, processes are broken. Because of functional specialization and the inability to learn from other outside of HR influences, the function becomes an internal exercise of marginal improvements.
With 70% of resources being experts in design problem solving and project management, they provide the capability to solve big complex issues across the business and for those facing HR.
The unnatural capability for HR to build would be to not have boxes to fill in an organization chart but ideas to build on the company’s growth plan.
Speed Is Inevitable, Build for It.
In the shift from being at the speed of the customer to being at the speed of an idea, the one common thread is the speed. In the AI Native Era, this only multiplies as with technology, ideas will move faster than customer expectations. And this is the shift that HR has to lead for the enterprise.
Today, increasingly we see knowledge commoditized. We see expertise distributed widely through knowledge management tools. Real expertise becomes more elite, complex and highly valued while at the same time, distributed knowledge evens out the field – smaller companies can innovate at speed with one fourth of the resources of a well-established larger one.
The "relentless pursuit of an idea for the future is the single hardest thing a company can do", as these internal barriers are formidable.
In an era of AI-native thinking, where AI accelerates ideation and new possibilities emerge even from algorithms, the "speed of an idea" far outpaces the "speed of the customer"
Companies failing to embrace this shift—trapped by their internal "legacy as a liability"—risk obsolescence, as "ideas don't die, companies do". Overcoming these blocks requires prioritizing ideas and cultivating a nuanced, multidisciplinary mindset.