Implementation of innovation is one of the toughest things I know. I served as a director of a company called Landmark Communications, which owned the Weather Channel, for about 22 years. They said everybody is responsible for success. It isn't what you can't do, it's: what is the problem and what is your contribution to solving it?

But one of the big thing that Frank Batten — who is my hero as a manager — said is, "We have to accept the right kinds of failure." I saw him give a very large bonus to somebody whose division lost $60 million. He said, "If you hadn't done a brilliant job of managing, we would have lost $100 million, and I want my best managers to work on my hardest problems. So I have to accept if you do a good job, it doesn't mean we're always going to win."

Whether at the Weather Channel or the newspapers, this was a complicated business. And what he tried to do with everything he did was say, "We're in this together. This is about Landmark." One-hundred-eighty people shared in the stock value. When it went public and was sold, there were a lot of millionaires and multimillionaires created, because everybody felt they were on one team.

One of the other things I saw in him was he said, "We're not going to hit the ball out of the park. Let's just get a whole series of singles and doubles and other things that move us forward." So "continuous adaptive change" became the watchword. Now that continuous adaptive change over 22 years took the company from a value of about $300 million to about $5 billion.

People talk about clear lines of authority and responsibility — we want to make sure that we measure people and pay for results. Well, paying for results is crazy. You don't want to pay for results. You don't want to pay for effort. Effort plus skill equals performance, and performance plus luck equals results. And what I think typified Landmark and Frank's management style is he knew the difference between results and performance.