Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but its pretty much the whole game today.

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

Companies do not do new things because they understand it but because they feel it.

Alan Kay's famous aphorism is that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens.

The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.

What's true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That's why the most resilient things in our world - biological life, stock markets, the Internet - are loosely organized.

All too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own.