This story appears in the January 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
My first corporate offsite began, as many do, in a windowless hotel meeting room seemingly designed to disconnect us from the world we were sent to reimagine.
But, there we sat — the “chosen ones” — freshly plucked from our cubicles to participate in an outside-the-box exercise under the pale fluorescent glow that made all of us look vaguely unwell.
It was 1999, the height of the dot-com fever. Our CEO, freshly inspired by listening to an audiobook of Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” was convinced this was our chance to rethink everything before someone else ate our lunch.
He began with a “what-if” exercise. We were to write any question on one of the provided pastel-colored sticky notes — no matter how outlandish or difficult — and stick it to the beige walls to kick off our creative opus.
With a theatrical flourish, he plucked the first question from the wall, then read it aloud with the deliberate cadence of someone who had not yet processed what they were saying: “What if the people in this room aren’t the ones who can solve this problem?”
It turned out that there was at least one question that was too uncomfortable to consider.
Today, we find ourselves in another era of technological upheaval with leaders throwing AI tools at teams, demanding they innovate wildly. That’s a mistake. Innovation is hard, risky, rare and time-consuming. And let’s be honest: How many of us were actually hired because we were seen as innovators?
Innovation ranks high on every CEO’s wishlist, yet remains notoriously difficult to define and even harder to deliver. Research from Harvard Business School and MIT suggests that about 95 percent of new product and AI initiatives fail. McKinsey reports that only 6 percent of executives are satisfied with their innovation performance.
The problem isn’t a lack of ambition; it’s that there’s too much of it.
The 1 percent solution
In 2003, British Cycling was in crisis. No Olympic gold in 76 years. No Tour de France win in more than a century. Performance was so dismal that a top bike manufacturer refused to sell them equipment, fearing brand damage.
When Dave Brailsford, the new performance director, was brought on, he didn’t promise an innovative revolution. Instead, he introduced a philosophy of “aggregation of marginal gains” to improve every aspect of British Cycling by just 1 percent.
The seat design. Tire grip. Sleep quality. Nutrition. Hand-washing protocols to avoid colds. He even had the team truck floor painted white so mechanics could easily spot dirt and keep chains cleaner.
None of these changes would win a race alone. But, together, they would compound. They started winning Olympic gold medals. Brailsford predicted a Tour de France victory within five years. They won in three.
The magical math of compounding
The power of marginal gains is mathematical. If you improve by 1 percent every day for a year, you don’t end up 365 percent better. You end up more than 37 times better:
(1.01)365 = 37.78
Slip by 1 percent each day? You’ll be left with almost nothing:
(0.99)365 = 0.03
This is why our obsession with moonshot innovation can be dangerous theater. We chase the 10x blockbuster while neglecting 10 1 percent improvements that could quietly take us further with far less risk.
When you pursue radical innovation, you’re making one big bet. With marginal gains, you’re making dozens of tiny, testable bets. The ones that work will compound. The ones that don’t are easy to abandon.
Be patient but persistent
Executives don’t have an innovation problem. They have an impatience problem fueled by a fundamental contradiction: AI might prove more transformative than the internet itself, but its hype cycle compresses decision timelines faster than any previous technology.
When a technology is moving this fast, a “wait-and-see” attitude feels like surrender. The impatience is understandable. But the choice isn’t between urgency or caution. It’s choosing what you’re being urgent about.
Stop asking, “What’s the breakthrough idea?” and start asking, “What’s the smallest improvement we can make today that compounds?”
Twenty years from now, no one will remember the offsite with sticky notes and quick solutions. But they will notice if you built an organization that got 1 percent better every single day.
That’s the innovator’s new dilemma: The courage to aim lower, improve faster and win bigger.