Smart mobile phones connect you with 1 billion users worldwide, basically for free - you don't pay for the phone, you don't pay for the Internet, you don't pay for the wireless connectivity. Social networks let you add a new customer or a new agent, again for free.

To enter the maintsteam market is an act of aggression. The companies who have already established relationships with your target customer will resent your intrusion and do everything they can to shut you out.

The biggest problem is typically overly ambitious expectations combined with undercapitalization.

We have embarked upon the world's largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for grabs.

Systems are corporate funded mechanisms for increasing efficiency; programs are user funded mechanisms for increasing effectiveness. Programs should generally be charged back to users, systems should never be. Allocating corporate overhead to the operating units is simply a mistake.

If you ask why start-ups outperform established enterprises when it comes to catching the next wave, the answer is that they are not conflicted. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. That is never the case in a company that has a portfolio of businesses at different stages in their maturity. So the key to winning there has to be to "zone out" the conflicts - sort of like sending quarrelling children each to their own room.

When you are incubating new ideas, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is very good advice. But when you are seeking to transform your enterprise's portfolio by scaling a fledgling business to material size - say ten percent of total enterprise revenue - then it is imperative that you make that the singular focus of everyone in the enterprise for the two to three year period it is likely to require to reach its tipping point. Expecting to do two such scaling efforts in parallel is simply folly, yet that is what the "eggs/basket" idea is often used to justify.