A young entrepreneur recently asked me how corporations can thrive in today’s tech landscape. “In a world of rapidly accelerating change, where technology threatens to remake almost every aspect of every company in every industry, how do large corporations, built for predictability and stability, adapt and innovate fast enough to survive and thrive?” he asked.

I provided a full answer but was tempted to say: “Come to my high-tech industry. This is the way we have always lived.”

Change is the only permanent part of life. Technology has always been a change agent, altering the way we live, work, war, farm, build and leave the planet. Other industries can learn from the soul of Silicon Valley, where change is not just a good thing but the essence of life itself.

What other industries are rapidly becoming aware of is that they too need stunning, rapid, even monumental innovation to catapult past competitors. We are beginning to see otherwise sedate industries using Silicon Valley language and challenging their employees to think more like Steve Jobs than Henry Ford.

How Tech Leaders Stay In The Lead

High tech is an industry where a small change can knock market leaders from first to last place overnight. Silicon Valley is a graveyard of fallen titans, each bested by something new. I’m credited with conceptualizing the wafer stepper, which dramatically shrunk the geometries of semiconductors. This changed the fates of companies who adopted this technology and left others to slowly perish.

Here are the lessons well understood in Silicon Valley, now offered to every industry.

Be the change. Winston Churchill once said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” This was not only a statement about his penning of the history of his age but also his active role in shaping world events.

When you define change, you lead change. Every business leader should create an organizational mindset of being at the forefront of their industry — to be the leader, not the follower. It is a more treacherous path, for the unknown is always murky. Companies who blaze trails find new worlds with new riches and take the lion’s share of it.