Typically an executive, assigned to drive some innovation or initiative, would turn to one of his reports—possibly a director or senior manager—who might have responsibility for five of the executive’s 26 total initiatives. The executive would ask the director to identify one of those direct reports—let’s say a project manager—who would add the project to their to-do list. The PM, in turn, would prevail upon an engineering director to see if one of their dev teams could squeeze the work into their dev schedule.
