Chaos by design- an inside story of Google

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/02/8387489/index.htm?postversion=2006100210

I was about to name this post "innovation with no direction", which I believe is the most important managerial lesson we can get from this article. The guys at Google have got it right when it comes to innovation (and other things as well).
In today's world, innovation happens more outside organizations driven by self-assembling groups that pursue their own targets, than inside companies with a well dictated agenda for innovation. Why not try to make it as emergent inside as it is outside?
Well, you can do that if you're prepared to adapt your own business model depending on the results. That is not apt for most companies today. There must be a paradigm shift in the way we think of innovation. In the traditional model the innovation gets killed when it reaches the execution phase. In the new one, it gets killed if it does not fly; instead of death by management, projects can be death by natural selection. Managing innovation is supposed to be finding new ways to do something. Here we're talking about finding new things to do. And that's a different story.