Launching isn’t a onetime, singular event, but a continual process of launch, measure, adjust, repeat. The cofounder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has said that if you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. It’s ridiculous to believe that every company grows out of a founder’s fully formed and unchanging idea, especially since most wildly successful companies achieved their place only by course-correcting, changing entirely, or iterating their way to greatness.

Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, exemplifies the influencer style of leadership. He recalled that when he stepped into the CEO position at Adobe, “I quickly realized there was no direct control, it was all influence.” He described how he worked intensively on developing his people leadership skills.

Getting out of the C-suite down into the company and out into the field pays great dividends and allows you to see and hear for yourself how moves are unfolding. Frontline employees may have a very different view from what’s included in the assessments being shared with your team. All sorts of discoveries about how products and services can be improved can result. Indra Nooyi got “out in the marketplace almost every week.” She was a great anthropologist. One day, she even spent some time sitting in a car in the parking lot of a Publix store with the head of Pepsi’s American Foods division. She wanted to watch shoppers enter and exit, and her observations led her to a great insight. She made note that many elderly shoppers would stop to chat with one another. “Shopping was clearly a happy occasion for them,” she recounts. Then inside the store, she had a major realization. The Pepsi soda and Aquafina bottles were all being sold in twenty-four-pack cases. How could those elderly people load those into their cars? She subsequently sent a team of product people to the MIT AgeLab, which specializes in working with organizations to improve elders’ quality of life, such as through product engineering sensitive to their needs. The Pepsi team came back with many ideas, which they used to redesign product features, such as making twist-off drink bottles easier to open. Nooyi was brilliantly combining her intuition with expert information.

The perceived wisdom then,” he recalled, was that DBS should create a separate division for digital banking or buy a fintech start-up. “We took a contrary view. We were going to bring everyone along. Our battle cry was that we were going to become a twenty-thousand-person start-up.” He invested heavily in retraining existing employees and hired a phalanx of data scientists. To engage employees in the mission, he launched regular hackathons and he set a goal of conducting one thousand experiments a year.

With a strong focus on optimizing the potential of artificial intelligence, he had to pour himself into learning about the technology. One way he did so was to take part in a global competition called DeepRacer hosted by Amazon Web Services. Participants must program a self-driving model car that they race on a track, and competitors with the fastest time then compete in a showdown. From this endeavor, not only did Gupta learn more of the ins and outs of AI development but his participation also inspired employees throughout the organization to embrace the reinvention. Three thousand DBS employees participated, and out of them, Gupta came nineteenth in the race. DBS won the competition for the Asian region, and three of its employees participated in the grand finale held in Las Vegas.

The result of Gupta’s constant push for innovation is that DBS was named best bank in the world by Global Finance magazine, not just that once in 2018 but every year thereafter, for five years in a row as of this writing.

Early in his career, Altman observed that new CEOs only succeeded if they “refounded” the company. He did this with conviction at YC when he inherited the presidency. He created new programs, including a new fund, to expand the accelerator’s support for startups at different stages. He moved into hard technologies—those that required ambitious scientific innovation, including nuclear fusion, quantum computing, and self-driving cars. Already a prestigious name brand, YC’s sphere of influence grew from a couple hundred companies to thousands a year, turning it into a center of gravity in Silicon Valley. “The thing that I’m most proud of is we really built an empire,” Altman said after stepping down as president.