Conventional cultures produce conventional results. To truly innovate, you have to rethink how you incentivize risk, respond to requests, and make resources available for experimentation.

CIO Ed Giaquinto took to heart a lesson he learned on the job a decade ago.

A former engineer at big-box retailer Toys R Us, he and his co-workers would spend weekends upgrading inventory management and logistic systems at distribution centers, working on servers that required the distribution centers to come offline.

Upgrading systems all weekend wasn’t much fun, Giaquinto says, nor did he think it was necessary, so he engineered a process to cut the two days of work down to three hours.

As he explains: “I wasn’t going to stick with what was established.”

Giaquinto, now CIO of the website security company Sectigo, still believes in disrupting the status quo. But he says too many executives and team members don’t embrace that mentality, instead allowing convention to get in the way of innovation.