To fix the business, to bring it back to health, you must assimilate enough of the disruptive innovation to modernize the operating model without jettisoning your business model. This typically requires new leaders and definitely requires new (if temporary) rules. The CEO is the only person who can dictate the correct terms in a timely manner and maintain the enterprise's commitment to those terms for the duration of the rehabilitation effort.

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

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.

Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.

The danger is to cling to comfort and custom at a time when events demand breaking away from both. But it is also foolish to jump at every startling moment. Darwin selects primarily for prudent fast-following.

Don't think you have to be the disrupter to win. A fast-following disruptee will do very well if you can bring your existing customers and ecosystem along with you.

A technology becomes truly disruptive when it drives the marginal cost of something that used to be scarce and expensive to approach zero. Thus, it used to be to deploy software at scale, you had to fund a data center, buy a set of servers, storage, and networking gear, build an in-house IT management capability, and buy an expensive stack of enabling software before you could even get started. Now you can get all that from Amazon or Microsoft on a pay-as-you-grow model.