It works? Compared to what?

Whenever I talk about what I think of as effective ways to work, somebody always pushes back with “what we’re doing now works,” and "<some behemoth company> doesn't do that and they're successful!" Sure. When you have enough money, you can work in ineffective ways.

So, I have a few questions for the skeptics:

A large percentage of Google's work (Google is often cited to me) goes into flash-in-the-pan projects that either never see the light of day or quickly fade away. Anybody remember Google Hangouts, Stadia, Currents, Jacquard, Talk, Glass? There are literally 100+ more. They can afford to throw that money away. Can you?

A big company can put 100 people on a project/product for a 1% productivity boost. That's an expensive 1%, but it's still better than zero. They can afford it. Can you?

Would those companies be even more successful (or at least more profitable) if they worked in a different way? Have they ever even tried working in a different way? "It works" always begs the question "compared to what?"

Can your company afford to be as inefficient as they are?

Is their success tied to the way they work now or to how they worked when they were a startup? Startups and established enterprises have different needs (innovation vs maintaining), so of course, they will work in different ways, but applying behemoth thinking to anything other than a behemoth usually doesn’t go as well as people imagine.

Would their success have come faster if they had worked in a different way?

The it-works and they-do-it pushback is really a way of discounting innovation in the workplace, a way of glorifying the status quo. It’s rooted in a fear of change, even if that change would make things better. More to the point, it indicates a lack of imagination. Let’s imagine we could be better rather than pretending that what we’re doing now is perfect.