It’s a maxim you’ve likely heard repeated enough through the years that it became a mantra if you followed it – or a cliché if you failed to heed the wisdom of its simplicity: Walk your talk and the rest will follow.

Right now, business leaders are struggling to maintain grounding in an era of unprecedented upheaval of status quo assumptions and a dismantling of the historic "establishment" prerogatives.

If you look more closely at any number of marquee businesses that broke new ground and disrupted their universe, or innovators who pioneered a new game or at least altered its rules, a common theme emerges: The organization and its leaders, for the most part, modeled and fashioned the change their inventiveness inspired.