The Sponsors

When I was a kid, my father had a word for the car speeding ahead of us. He called it a “sponsor.” It was a joke, but the logic was clear: that driver in front would be the one to get fined — even though we were speeding too. The police can only stop one car at a time. So the sponsor takes the hit, and everyone else carries on.

This analogy applies to many organizations.

When you penalize teams for taking on risky and challenging projects, most teams will simply stop trying. Not because they lack ambition, but because no one wants to be the sponsor.

In large companies, leadership has limited bandwidth. Executives can only closely evaluate a handful of projects at any given time. The result is predictable: the most visible work gets attention, scrutiny, and resources, while most teams operate below the radar. And yet those under-the-radar teams make up the majority of the organization’s capacity.

Instead of moving at full speed, they self-regulate. Teams learn that visibility brings risk — more oversight, shifting priorities, unrealistic expectations, or becoming the next restructuring target. Staying unnoticed feels safer than standing out.

Innovation doesn’t slow because people lack ideas or motivation. It slows because the system trains people to optimize for safety instead of progress. The result is an organization with enormous theoretical capacity running at a fraction of its speed.

Organizations that want sustained innovation need to create space where experimentation is rewarded without automatically increasing scrutiny. Teams need to move quickly without feeling that success itself is a liability. When people stop optimizing for survival and start optimizing for outcomes, the dormant capacity inside large organizations becomes one of their strongest competitive advantages.