If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it. — Charles Kettering

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

Author: Charles Kettering

Insight: There's something oddly liberating about this observation, even if it stings a bit. We've all watched it happen: someone brings a fresh idea to a meeting, and by the time five or six people have weighed in with "considerations," the thing has been committee-ed to death. Not through malice, but through the mathematics of consensus. Everyone wants input. Everyone has a slightly different vision. Suddenly you're debating the color of the bike shed instead of building the bike. The hidden insight here is that it's not actually committees that kill ideas—it's the instinct to make everyone equally happy. One person can be wrong and still move forward. But a group? A group defaults to the safest version of everything, which often means the blandest version. The enthusiasm gets sanded down by politeness and process. What started as "let's try something new" becomes "let's form a working group to study the feasibility." This doesn't mean you should ignore other perspectives. But it does suggest that truly new things often need a small, opinionated nucleus to survive their own birth. Too many cooks don't just spoil the broth—they turn it into something no one actually wanted to eat in the first place.