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Big organizations still breed cross-functional initiatives like overripe bananas breed fruit flies—and nowadays, they’re multiplying faster than ever. Hybrid and remote work, generative AI projects, rapid digital transformations, and economic volatility have made them essential for staying competitive.

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The masters of innovation–Netflix, Salesforce.com, Google, Tesla Motors–aren’t trying to innovate. They are trying to dominate. These winners keep winning because they know which rocks to break and which targets to shoot for.

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Henry Ford said that failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.

But many of us begin again with no increase in intelligence. Or, we don’t get smarter because we won’t risk failure in the first place.

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Successful innovation requires successful experimentation, and successful experimentation requires eagerness to learn from failure. This has become a cliché because it holds true, time and time again.

“Innovation sandbox” is a term coined by the late C.K. Prahalad. The gist: For a truly quantum innovation in either goods or services, (1) set a really high bar for what “good” looks like, (2) identify a small handful of aggressive constraints, and then, within that “sandbox” (3) begin a radical re-examination of your assumptions and self-imposed limits as you develop your breakthrough design. That combination forces you to, as Apple says, “think different.”

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Why do some bureaucracies succeed while many others fail? There are endless explanations for this, and we will add one more: slow courage.

We’re not talking about the kind of heroism displayed in 1987 by U.S. sailor Wayne Weaver who escaped a fierce on-board fire only to turn around and go back for his buddies -- three times.

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In our business, we see a lot of strategic plans. In too many of them we see this cute little two-step trick we call, “The Wimp’s Way Out”:

Step one: First, declare bland, no fail, effort-based goals.