Recently, Bill Taylor published a post on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network about difficulties of innovating in a company with a long history of success. Much of what he wrote struck a chord with me.

I’ve always thought that it’s limiting to compare our companies to their past performance or even to benchmark them against industry performance. At some point, who cares how we did in the past? These comparisons can give us context, but we should open our minds to bigger possibilities. Do we only want to do a little better than we have in the past? Why not think of a game-changer?

Another challenge we face while improving is that we don’t want to lose what is good about our culture. You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Taylor calls this “breaking from the past without disavowing it.” We need to celebrate our successes yet be dissatisfied with the status quo. That’s definitely a challenge. How well we get everyone in our organizations to embrace this attitude will have a big impact on whether we thrive in the future.