There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.

The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.