The age of revolution requires revolutionaries.

If you act like a ward of your organization, you’ll be one, and both you and your company will lose. So if you’re still acting like a courtier, or a consort, bending to the prejudices of top management, buffing up their outsized egos, fretting about what they want to hear, getting calluses on your knees—stop! You’re going to rob yourself and your company of a future that’s worth having. No excuses. No fear. If you’re going to be an activist, these have to be more than T-shirt slogans.

In the new industrial order, the battle is not democracy versus totalitarianism or globalism versus tribalism, it is innovation versus precedent. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it perfectly when he said, “There are always two parties—the party of the past and the party of the future, the establishment and the movement.”

Which side are you on?