I don’t make a habit of listening to Rory Sutherland, let alone quoting him, but TikTok showed me one particular clip that chimed louder than usual.
“The two chief preoccupations of large organisations are cost-cutting and regulatory paranoia.
So what you have is organisations where finance, compliance, procurement, and HR are the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse.
They have a right of veto over more or less everything. And those are all people who are disproportionately punished if anything goes wrong and therefore are massively incentivised against trying anything new.
But also they can claim the credit for any reduction in costs without being held responsible for any loss of opportunity or destruction of long-term value.”
It’s reductive obviously, and disrespectful to the thoughtful folk in those professions who strategise and check their own risk-aversion. But there’s a structural truth here about power bases and incentives in organisations that make placing bets on innovation and transformation, and adopting new ways of doing, incredibly hard.