When a politician bends the truth or a CEO breaks a promise, trust takes a beating.

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, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

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

The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.