The concept of Internal Antibodies first caught my attention while I was engrossed in the book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Corporate Antibodies are those individuals or factions within a company who actively oppose change or innovation. They function much like the antibodies in our bodies, fighting against foreign substances. Similarly, these corporate antibodies resist anything that threatens to disrupt the organization’s status quo. They may do this by criticizing new ideas, constructing bureaucratic hurdles, fostering negativity and fear about proposed changes, or simply disregarding new proposals.
In his book, the author illustrates this concept with several examples of situations where these internal antibodies posed a formidable resistance to change - be it new projects, reorganizations, or novel ways of doing things:
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There were times when the internal antibodies at Apple tried to expel us from the organization— we’d constantly hear “We have other priorities; we’ll help you if we have time.” Or “Why are we doing this project— it’s not core to our business.”
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The natural antibodies at Google detected something new, different, foreign and did everything they possibly could to avoid or ignore it. They would smile and smile but the promised meetings, the oversight from Google management, the plans we’d made to integrate— they all started to fall apart.