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Before you pitch your next big idea, remember the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. In the late 1970s, someone in the Army had a notion to build something that could transport 11-soldier squads into battle. Then the suggestions--and the chaos--started. Let's add a roof! And a missile launcher! More armor! The result was a $13 billion development boondoggle and a $1.6 million vehicle that could carry only seven people. The Bradley, as described in the film The Pentagon Wars, was "a troop transport that can't carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance, and a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snowblower."

For all the talk about how important ideas are in business, ideas are really a plentiful commodity. What's scarce are the skills to get ideas through the myriad layers of bureaucracy that threaten to declaw, neuter, or bloat them beyond recognition. "There's this irrational notion that when there's a great idea, everybody will see it and rally around it," says Samuel Bacharach, author of Get Them on Your Side. "When you introduce an idea, you've got to think about whom you're going to introduce it to, whom you need on your side in the beginning, how you're going to increase your coalition, and at what pace you're going to keep it moving." The ideas that win are the ones whose creators use a carefully balanced mix of political and managerial competence to build a consensus. The faster, stronger, and more cleverly you do that, the more you'll be able to fend off the naysayers, critics, and tweakers.

New ideas are bound to face resistance, of course, especially if they're perceived as risky for the company. Witness the effort by Peter Labaziewicz, Kodak's director of advanced development for digital cameras, to cram two lenses, wide-angle and zoom, into a single camera. "The initial reaction was, 'That's crazy,' " he says. Two lenses, not to mention two photo sensors, would make the camera too bulky and too expensive. Worse yet, some doubters asked, "If wide-angle is so great, why hasn't anyone done it before?" Labaziewicz used the nature of the doubts themselves to build support. "If the reaction is too positive from the engineering team," he realized, "then someone has probably already figured it out" and the idea isn't novel enough. Kodak had struggled with finding unique, relevant projects, so the harsh questions signaled that this could be a winner, which helped Labaziewicz win the engineers over. He assigned the one person who shared his vision, fellow designer Ivan Drake, whom Labaziewicz calls the "English bulldog," to work tenaciously with the engineers to find lower-priced sensors and lenses that would fit in the camera. "You can't just order the engineers to do the work," says Labaziewicz. Last fall, Kodak released the EasyShare V570, which ended up being thinner than its predecessor, even with two lenses, and received good reviews.