Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.

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

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

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.

What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

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

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.