The article is exactly right. It sounds like XLR8 isn't wrong in that identifies the two main activities of a growing business: 1) Making their bread-and-butte

The article is exactly right. It sounds like XLR8 isn't wrong in that identifies the two main activities of a growing business: 1) Making their bread-and-butter work as efficient as possible and 2) Innovating to multiply opportunities and inefficiencies. In short, a company needs to streamline and explore. But, advocating that the networking and exploration required for #2 is an offline, voluntary activity is foolish, dangerous even. I've worked in a variety of organizations of different sizes, in different industries and different states of startup or maturity and found one consistent pattern for failing organizations: They start to routinely tell people to "stay in their lane" at work and respond to new ideas with "Sounds great! As soon as these low value, high effort activities are done you can work on those high value, low effort ideas in your spare time." That's the beginning of brain death for a company. The body soon follows. Instead, strong companies with strong leadership know that it isn't their employees responsibility to be more efficient and productive at low-value, high-effort activities. It is the leadership's responsibility to root out and eliminate those activities either by automating, out-sourcing or de-prioritizing them. The right way to streamline a business is to listen to employees and relentlessly cut, kill, and destroy routine or low-value work. As you do that, you free up and empower employees and the organization to leverage high-value work in front of them and explore and pursue high-value opportunities on the horizon. In a healthy, growing organization those are everyday (during the day) activities not after-hours, side-projects that force employees to sneak time from work or steal time from their families.