Why Big Companies Squander Good Ideas
The FT’s Undercover Economist on the real reasons that corporate innovation dies
By Tim Harford
J F C Fuller did not invent the tank.
That distinction should probably fall to E L de Mole, an Australian who approached the British war office in 1912 with a design that was — in the words of historians Kenneth Macksey and John Batchelor — “so convincingly similar to those which finally went into service that one wonders why it was never adopted from the outset”.
But when the British army eventually introduced the tank, it was J F C Fuller, chief staff officer of what would later become the tank corps, who understood what to do with it.
At 39 years old, Fuller was a small man with a neatly trimmed moustache and a hairline that had retreated over his crown and was beginning to march down the back of his head. He could have passed for a butler in a costume drama, but his appearance belied an inner radicalism. (He had been friends — and then enemies — with the occultist Aleister Crowley.)
Late in 1917, after almost 400 British tanks had, with modest success, lumbered across the German lines at the battle of Cambrai, Fuller applied his radical streak to the problem of using the tank effectively.
