Entrepreneurship visionary Vinod Khosla recently remarked that "The more success you've had in the past, the less critically you examine your own assumptions."
This simple yet powerful dynamic has been the bane of more than a few hugely successful businesses whose assumptions became outdated enough to implode the enterprise. I would argue that more organizations put themselves out of business than their competition ever could.
It's amazing to see how the norm in most organizations is widely out of date structures and practices. Leaders continue to manage communication and control, decisions and planning with very outdated models, methods and approaches. They would never allow their technical people to maintain technologies that date back to the 1940s and 50s yet their approach to business goes back at least that far. In most cases, leaders don't track what's up to date. That becomes our very rewarding work.