an executive at a large company and in our industry we are seeing a trend wherein smaller companies are gaining market share at an alarming rate. Our CEO believes the reason for this is that smaller companies are more prone to innovation and more entrepreneurial than larger companies. He has instructed me to form a committee to study this trend and make recommendations on how we should deal with it. I?m an executive Troy Tulowitzki Womens Jersey , not an entrepreneur. Any advice would be very much appreciated. -- Name withheld by request A: Your question reminds me of the time my teenage daughter tricked me into doing a chemistry project for her under the pretense of asking for my advice. ?But, daddy, you?re just so smart?? The result was that hermy experiment got a C instead of an A and almost started a fire in the chemistry lab. Reckon daddy wasn?t so smart after all: at least that was the opinion of the principal, her teacher, the fire marshal, and ultimately, my manipulative, yet adoring daughter. However Carlos Gonzalez Womens Jersey , you?re in luck, Mr. X, because I know considerably more about innovation and entrepreneurship than mixing combustible chemicals. Judging by your use of the buzzwords ?innovation? and ?entrepreneurial? I?d bet your CEO?s opinion (which I believe is dead-on, by the way) may have come from the Conference Board's CEO Challenge 2004, which reported that 87% of the 540 global businesses surveyed cited innovation and enabling entrepreneur- ship as priorities for their companies. Furthermore, 31% of companies surveyed considered these issues to be of the "greatest concern.? FYI, the Conference Board is an 88 year-old, not-for-profit Michael Cuddyer Womens Jersey , global, independent membership organization that ?conducts research, convenes conferences, makes forecasts, assesses trends, publishes information and analysis, and brings executives together to learn from one another. ? What many Conference Board members are learning is that they are getting their big corporate behinds kicked by smaller, more innovative Matt Belisle Womens Jersey , entrepreneurial companies that are not burdened by the need to have a meeting once an hour or to bury every great idea under a mound of red tape. You said it yourself: your CEO told you to set up a committee to study the trend. You might as well paint a big black hole on the wall and have everyone take turns trying to run through it. Committees and superfluous meetings are the biggest wasters of time and money in the corporate world and rarely produce anything even remotely resembling results and they are indicative of why smaller companies are gaining ground on their larger brethren. Theant. Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the executives to the managers to each and every employee must become innovation generators and entrepreneurial thinkers. You must create an environment where shooting for the stars is the norm instead of the shooting down of ideas. To put it simply, you must turn your lumbering giant Goliath into a raging horde of Davids. Now I don?t mean that you should arm your employees with slings and rocks and turn them loose on upper management Jhoulys Chacin Womens Jersey , although that could be really fun to watch. What I?m talking about is turning your organization into an innovative, entrepreneurial machine where everyone from the CEO to the janitor works to make the company more competitive and profitable. One reason that large organizations are resistant to innovation is that everyone is so busy just keeping the wheels in motion and putting out fires and dealing with the day-to-day drama of big business that no one has the time to even think about innovation. And Heaven forbid they have to think like entrepreneurs. No one has time to even consider the opportunities that innovation