Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

Your organization can start tweeting, but that wont change its DNA.

There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.

One way of building private foresight out of public data is looking where others aren't ... if you want to see the future, go to an industry confab and get the list of what was talked about. Then ask, "What did people never talk about?" That's where you're going to find opportunity.