CFO's Edward Teach has summarized the key concepts in our book Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution.

Teach mentions the three challenges we stress for all would-be strategic innovators:

1. Forgetting. The new business (NewCo) must selectively "forget" the success formula of the most closely related business unit within the company (CoreCo).

2. Borrowing. NewCo must borrow those assets of CoreCo that will give it a competitive advantage, such as manufacturing capacity, or sales relationships, or a brand.

3. Learning. NewCo must learn how to succeed in a new and uncertain environment.

CFOs, who play a central role in planning, business evaluation, and resource allocation, can aid the task of forgetting by taking a couple of key steps:

- develop new performance measures for NewCo
- hold NewCo's managers accountable for learning, not meeting the numbers

Read Teach's article: "First, Forget What Works."

In our book, Chris and I urge executives to assess the degree of difficulty of the learning challenge presented by the strategic experiment they're undertaking. Specifically, we ask executives to examine the range of critical unknowns and pin-point the intensifiers of the learning challenge. We've outlined a step-by-step method to help executives understand how much time they should dedicate to supervision and how best to direct their efforts; see page 182.