How do you get the best value from employees over time? You might think this is a no-brainer: assign your top talent to the most challenging, high-value opportunities. But Michael Schrage, author of Serious Play and a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, has another view. Put your best people on your most boring challenges.

Schrage points out that as organizations grow, the tedious tasks tend to pile up, creating a big challenge. The answer is often "jury-rigged" processes that fix the problem in the near-term, but create significant headaches for the long-term. "Savvy leaders understand that, as their operations scale, the real barriers to growth aren't around the ingenuity of value-added implementations," Schrage writes. "They're in the lag-behind, necessary evil support systems and three-quarter baked infrastructures desperately attempting to support them."

Putting your most talented employees to work on these challenges – tedious and boring as they may be – is the best strategy for sustainable innovation.

Do you agree with Schrage?  Should leaders assign their top talent to the “boring” task of fixing their organization's most inefficient processes? Share your thoughts in the comments.