Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change

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Leading in Stormy Seas

Shift how your leaders think about risk-taking and risk management to ensure that your change efforts are adopted and sustained.

Astro Teller heads up X, the advanced research lab at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. From his name, you might think he’s a character in a science fiction story. In a way he is. Some of the technologies X is working on—in augmented reality, optical communications, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy—sound more like fiction than the scalable business propositions that they’ll become.

Alphabet is a trillion-dollar enterprise, and Astro’s job is to double its valuation. No one has ever tried to do that before. There are no known best practices for putting such a big dent in the universe—you ...