When scaling rapidly, companies naturally develop departmental silos and a tendency towards small, incremental improvements. These two forces actively work against the bold, cross-functional bets required to reach the next revenue milestone and must be actively fought.

Don't make high-stakes decisions in a silo. Involve stakeholders throughout the discovery and analysis process. Having finance review your P&L or sales weigh in on customer pain builds shared context and turns your recommendation from 'your bet' into 'our bet.'

Inspired by research methods at CERN, companies can now afford to have two isolated teams build separate solutions for the same problem. Because AI-powered tools have dramatically lowered engineering costs, this 'co-opetition' enables parallel experimentation to find the globally optimal solution and avoid getting stuck in a local minimum.

Apply the logic of agile "flash teams" to your stable team by treating its boundaries as porous. Adopting an "experts everywhere, all the time" mindset encourages you to constantly look for and pull in expertise from anywhere—inside or outside the organization—to break down team silos and accelerate problem-solving.

Afeyan advises against making breakthrough innovation everyone's responsibility, as it's unsustainable and disruptive to daily jobs. Instead, companies should create a separate group with different motivations, composition, and rewards, focused solely on discontinuous leaps.

Frame moonshot projects like Google's Waymo not as singular bets, but as platforms for innovation. Even if the primary goal fails, the project should be structured to spin off valuable 'side effects'—advances in component technologies like AI, mapping, or hardware that benefit the core business.

To balance short-term needs and long-term goals, create accountable teams that own a component of the overall vision. These teams must control the entire product lifecycle—from discovery to implementation—so they can make intelligent near-term trade-offs without losing sight of the strategic goal.

Instead of large, top-down innovation projects, Prosus empowers small, autonomous 'jet ski' teams of 5-10 people. These teams experiment rapidly with minimal resources, failing often until they find a viable model. Only then does the larger company invest to scale the proven concept, avoiding massive losses on unproven ideas.

To maintain speed, leaders in large companies should focus their personal energy on high-potential projects that the organization won't solve on its own. These are often risky, cross-functional initiatives that require senior intervention to overcome corporate inertia.