I was sitting in a meeting with a top leadership team that I was working with to introduce a new go-to-market strategy and operating model. Having chosen to build it on a platform of Customer Intimacy, they had set up three teams staffed by high-potentials – their best and brightest – to come back with innovative ways to use Customer Intimacy to drive competitive advantage in their lines of business. The thinking was that forming these teams would create high levels of engagement among the people they saw as the best internal candidates to move onto the executive team and give the top team an opportunity to further assess them in action.

There was a real buzz in the air. You could clearly tell that the teams were excited to get the opportunity to show their progress. As the meeting went on, with the teams presenting some really innovative ideas, I listened to the members of the top team offer feedback – feedback that took the form of comments like:

On a break, I asked one of the high-potentials what he thought about how it was going. He responded that he saw some real breakthrough ideas being presented by the teams. I told him that I did, too. Then he lamented that nothing would come of it. “I don’t know why they keep asking us to do stuff like this. They give it lip service, but they always shoot everything down. It’s like they don’t believe that anyone but them has ever had a good idea. I wish they would just number the excuses and use shorthand. Nope… number 3.”

Thomas Bata, the founder of Bata Shoe, was fond of telling the story of how he sent two salesmen to explore market potential in Africa. One cabled back to the home office: “No one here wears shoes. No potential.” The second salesman cabled: “Everyone here is barefoot. Infinite potential.”Bata believed in that potential long before any of his much larger Western competitors and went on to create the largest shoe company in the world, with over 30,000 employees at production facilities in more than 30 countries and, according to their web site, services more than a million customers a day through 5,000 international retail locations.

Mo Ibrahim saw the possibility of bringing mobile phones to sub-Saharan Africa when telecom giants saw only people living in poverty and logistical nightmares. The mobile phone company he founded as MSI Cellular Investments in 1998 and spun off as Celtel in 2000 served an estimated 24 million customers in 14 African countries at the time it was sold in 2005 for $3.4 billion.

Many companies have set up innovation labs, and it’s not a new idea. In the 1940s, Lockhead Martin’s chief engineer started their famous “skunk works” (so called because it was located in a tent next to a really foul-smelling manufacturing plant), and created America’s first jet fighter in just 143 days, along with a philosophy for rapid innovation that still serves as a model for companies today. DuPont’s Experimental Station (nylon, kevlar and neoprene); Google’s Google X (self driving cars, space elevators, wearable computers); Amazon’s Lab126 (the Kindle); Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab (with an aim of building a new product every two weeks, they expect 80 percent to fail, and that the 20 percent that succeed to have a huge, disruptive effect); Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology (3D holography, carbon nanotube technology).

How does your top team respond to innovative opportunities? What do you model for the rest of the organization? Do you recognize and nurture them or do you shut them down? Or do you send mixed messages, like another client I worked with told me in a moment of despair, “They tell us ‘Take risks’ but there’s a subtext of ‘Don’t screw up’ and people have had their career derailed for taking a risk that didn’t pan out. What are we supposed to do with that?”

Maybe the next time you hear someone on your leadership team start talking about why something can’t be done, you might want to share the story of ol’ Larry Walters, as told by Robert Fulghum, in his book All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (now stop and think about THAT for a moment):

Now let me tell you about Larry Walters, my hero. Walters is a truck driver, thirty-three years old. He is sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard, wishing he could fly. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to go “up’. To be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a long way. The time, money, education, and opportunity to be a pilot were not his. Hang gliding was too dangerous, and any good place for gliding was too far away. So he spent a lot of summer afternoons sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old aluminum lawn chair – the kind with the webbing and rivets…

The next chapter in this story is carried by the newspapers and television. There’s old Larry Walters up in the air over Los Angeles. Flying at last. Really getting UP there. Still sitting in his aluminum lawn chair, but it’s hooked on to forty-five helium-filled surplus weather balloons. Larry has a parachute on, a CB radio, a six-pack of beer, some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a BB gun to pop some of the balloons to come down. And instead of being just a couple of hundred feet over his neighborhood, he shot up eleven thousand feet, right through the approach corridor to the Los Angeles International Airport.”

It’ll never work… says who?