The best example is the music industry. Music companies are destroying themselves. It's obvious what's happening: technological discontinuity. We're going to have a music-distribution system that allows customers to download music from the Internet. It's a different model, and most music companies are fighting it. In the meantime, other new companies are coming along that are saying, "We love this model! Let's go after it!" Why do music companies fight it? The margins aren't there, and they're afraid. But their companies are going to be changed -- whether they like it or not.

Tap into the global brain pool.

The United States is very narrow-minded. We have this notion that we're the center of the universe, but we're only 4.5% of the world's population. So 95.5% of the world is outside of the United States. People talk about the U.S. cable industry, and how we have the world's best cable system. The largest cable network in the world is in China, where there are 75 million homes equipped with cable. Over the past seven and a half years, China has built a much better communications infrastructure than the United States has.

And all of these other countries have tremendous intellectual capital. There are all of these brains all over the world. Think of the United States as a big company, and other countries as little companies. Even if our brains have better output than the average brains, if the little companies have 10 times as many brains as we do, then maybe one of their brains is going to get the thing right. There are a lot of smart people in countries like Singapore and China who have never had a world market before. The Internet is the end of time and space. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it does reduce the importance of both.

Companies build their own coffins.

The real questions are, "Where is scale? Is scale today in having the best engineering team, as Bell Labs did? Or is scale in having the most customers? Or is scale being the best at doing venture investing? Or is scale in having the world's largest reach? What is important?" Whatever is important, if you try to keep everything in your company under your own control, then your company has built its own coffin: It's limited by itself in every direction. If you think of your company as a box, then there should be only one side to the box. The rest of the box should be open.

Individuals, not companies, lead.

When I was working at Intel, I was constrained by thinking about the world from Intel's point of view. The conventional wisdom is that corporations are the leaders that make things happen. But I'm suggesting something fundamentally new: Can we imagine a world in which leaders can leave their corporations and continue to lead? Do I have to be part of a corporation to use the power of a corporation?

I don't think of myself as a free agent, I think of myself as me. If I want to accomplish something, maybe I can better accomplish it without being part of any one company -- by being part of multiple companies. I'm hoping that other people will follow this model. Then we could have some great minds working on problems -- minds that are unconstrained by their companies' agendas.

Katharine Mieszkowski (Katharinem@fastcompany.com), a senior writer at Fast Company, is based in San Francisco. Contact Avram Miller by email (avrammiller@avrammiller.com), or visit the Avram Miller Co. on the Web (www.avrammiller.com).

Sidebar: What's Fast

Think fast. Here is Avram Miller's quick guide to doing business in Internet time.

Give up control.

Or the illusion of control. Companies no longer determine the success of products and markets -- if they ever did. Customers do. Control is an illusion, and the Internet has completely shattered that illusion. Nobody is in charge anymore.

Trust your intuition.

To make decisions, you can't spend weeks doing analysis. Deals won't wait around for that kind of due diligence. So you have to have a sense -- an intuition -- if something is a good thing to do, and then hone that sense through experience. Act now. Analyze later.

Follow the customers.

Companies are no longer setting the agenda of what customers want. They're finding out where the agenda is being set and enhancing it. The customers decide what's important. Your job is to listen and respond.

Steal this idea.

Imitation is not a crime on the Internet; it's a given. Smart sites constantly experiment to see what people like. Embrace experimentation and imitate imitation.

Be open.

Companies will succeed by investing in the ecosystem around their products, and by building the markets that they want to serve. New technologies and products will increasingly come from brains outside your company and from around the globe. Don't shut yourself off through prejudice about age, race, gender, nationality, or the size of the company that people come from -- or even their past track record. Open systems and open minds are fundamental to the future.

Think like a VC.

The two most important ingredients in a technology company are distribution capability and investment capacity. Technology is cheap, and nothing is unique -- not for long. Corporate development is the critical skill of technology companies.