The City of New Orleans and private businesses that struggled to survive the devastation of Hurricane Katrina learned some valuable lessons. One of the primary caveats when it comes to business continuity is to mitigate risk by embracing the cloud.

In 2010, when Netflix was still early into its shift from DVD rentals to online movies and shows, it started using Amazon Web Services, the retailer's cloud computing division. Now that Netflix streams 100 million-plus hours of video every day, it's sticking with Amazon partly because of Amazon's scale and features, and partly because switching vendors "would be a significant multi-year effort," says Yury Izrailevsky, Netflix's vice president for cloud and platform engineering.

Bosch Rexroth, a manufacturer of electric drives and controls, has boosted productivity and reduced the volume of inventory it must keep onsite by integrating radio frequency identification technology at its assembly line in Homburg, Germany.

If the company is the bus and its leader is the driver, as Jim Collins' famous analogy states, then it stands to reason that when the bus is moving, the driver should mostly be looking out the windshield (toward the future) rather than consulting the rear-view mirror.

The largest U.S. retailers reported strong online sales in their second-quarter earnings reports recently, extending a trend that has seen e-commerce revenue expand far faster than store sales, and several said they are making strides in delivering goods to consumers more profitably.