With all the huge and absurdly bad things Bush does, it can be easy to miss the small blunders. Let's hear it for Dubya's nomination of a 35-year-old junior white house lawyer to the Federal Reserve. Yes, 35-year-old Kevin Warsh, who has no academic background in economics, if confirmed, would be 1 of 7 people deciding fiscal policy for the USA. But don't worry, "Kevin has spent a lot of time observing and being in the financial markets," said Stephen Friedman.

Hey wait a minute...I've spent a lot of time observing and being in the financial markets, and I'm a few years older than Mr. Warsh. Yo, Dubya, hook me up!

The NY Times reported March 26th on a fantastic approach to innovation. Rite-Solutions created a company-internal market for ideas. Ironically, the article Rite-Solutions has posted on their own web site tells the story far more coherently. Instead of creating pointless chat forums, Rite-Solutions developed 3 stock markets for their ideas: a Nasdaq equivalent for new business ideas, an NYSE equivalent for extensions to current offerings, and a bond market for cost-savings ideas. Each idea for a new business or cost savings gets a ticker symbol and an initial value of $10, which the CTO adjusts based on personnel investment in the ideas.

The NY Times article (really written by FastCompany.com, who has a blog entry for this topic) does a decent job of explaining the networking enabled by this approach, and the importance of incentives for winning ideas. What the NYT seems to miss utterly is the importance of sincere executive sponsorship. Many methods for gathering ideas work well if employees believe their leaders are listening. As one woman posted to the FastCompany blog, the transparency of the market scheme plays a vital role. "Great ideas frequently vanish sometime in the approval process and the originator never knows what happened or why it was killed." Executives often kill ideas with scant explanation. And, one suspects, with the flimsiest of rationales.