After AT&T’s breakup in 1984, Bell Labs — the greatest innovation engine in corporate history — began its slow death. Not because the scientists got dumber. Not because the problems went away.
Because the leaders changed.
A new WSJ piece by Jon Gertner lays it out in painful detail: Bell Labs worked because visionary leaders like Mervin Kelly gave brilliant, curiouspeople time, space, and a problem worth solving. They funded long-term thinking. They built campuses designed for serendipitous collisions between physicists, chemists, and engineers. They measured success in decades, not quarters.
Then came the professional managers. The quarterly targets. The ROI spreadsheets.
The lab that employed 25,000 people and filed 30,000 patents withered. And here’s the kicker: when the internet arrived, Bell Labs’ own leaders failed to recognize the Arpanet’s transformative potential — even though the raw genius to see it was sitting right there in the building.
This is what the book How Leaders F*ck Up Innovation is about.
Not bad luck. Not bad markets. Bad leadership decisions — made by otherwise smart people who were playing the wrong game.
The patterns that killed Bell Labs are alive and well in boardrooms today. We’ve documented them. Named them. And we’re not done talking about them.
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Because the first step to not f*cking up innovation is knowing how it happens.
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