Recently, I wrote a list of “12 Things Good Bosses Believe.” Now I want to delve into the ninth belief mentioned in that article: “Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.”

An evidence-based mantra is that, to get a few good ideas, you and your colleagues need to generate a lot of bad ideas. I wrote about this notion in my article “Forgive and Remember” where we saw that, to yield a dozen or so commercially successful ideas for toys, a group at IDEO generated more than 4,000 nonstarters. It turns out, however, that the best managed enterprises don’t just recognize the flowers among the weeds; they mow down a lot of the flowers, too.

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