Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.

Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.

Leaders today face challenges for which they are utterly unprepared.

If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.

One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.

You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.