I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth.

Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.

The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.

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.