If You Have a Chief Innovation Officer, Your Company Is In Trouble

Companies don’t fail because they lack ideas.
They fail because they outsource thinking.

And nothing signals that faster than appointing a Chief Innovation Officer.

When you create a role whose job is “innovation,” what you’re really saying is:
• Everyone else can keep doing things the old way.
• Innovation is a department, not a behavior.
• Risk-taking is someone else’s problem.

Innovation becomes a silo.
And once it becomes a silo, it dies.

The healthiest companies don’t have a “department of new ideas.”
They have a culture where:
• Frontline employees challenge assumptions.
• Operators are empowered to break what isn’t working.
• Leaders reward experiments, not just outcomes.
• Teams build, test, and iterate without waiting for a committee.

Innovation isn’t a job title.
It’s an operating system.

If you need a Chief Innovation Officer to tell your company to innovate, the problem isn’t the title, it’s the culture.

Fix that, and you won’t need someone with “innovation” in their name at all.