You can't find returns in investments you haven't made.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn't work and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you become commercially successful.

One reason there are so many short-lived management fads is that their prescriptions were derived and advocated in precisely this way. So managers read about a fad and try it, find that it doesn't work, abandon the effort, and move on to the next thing. In reality, it is usually the case that the faddish prescription was indeed sound advice in certain circumstances, but actually was poor advice in other circumstances.

Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

Generally, the technology that enables disruption is developed in the companies that are the practitioners of the original technology. That's where the understanding of the technology first comes together. They usually can't commercialize the technology because they have to couple it with the business model innovation, and because they tend to try to take all of their technologies to market through their original business model, somebody else just picks up the technology and changes the world through the business model innovation.

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change.