One "path" to a good, new business is just to see the opportunity and take it.

E.g., what was the "path" taken by each of FedEx, Google, Facebook, or Amazon?

FedEx: Nationwide overnight delivery of small packages, pickup as late as 7 PM and delivery before 10 AM. "Path": Founder F. Smith had a family fortune from Southern Greyhound, had flown in Viet Nam, and was running Little Rock Airmotive, executive jet lube, tune, interior decorating. He took a rock solid executive jet, the Dassault DA-20 Fanjet Falcon, 28,660 pounds gross take off weight, 6000 pounds or so max cargo weight, did modifications to make it haul freight, got the FAA approvals, had a few such jets, set up in some old WWII hanger space on the Memphis airport, started with service to just a few cities, and grew from there. I wrote some software to schedule the full planned fleet, pleased the BoD, enabled crucial funding, and saved the business. I did some calculus for the differential equation

y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

pleased the BoD, and saved the company a second time. I couldn't hope to do better than that, and the promised stock was very late. I went for a Ph.D., something that might help my career and that no one could take away from me.

Google: Two guys in a computerized library project at Stanford. People liked their search results better than those of Alta Vista.

Facebook: Zuck's Hot or Not at Harvard, somehow much more attractive than MySpace, and some VC money.

Amazon: Bezos had a, IRCC, Princeton or Harvard computer science major, worked on Wall Street, and rounded up some VC money. Early on it was just books and records. As the commercial internet caught on, lots of people had Web browsers; secure means of on-line payments were implemented; Internet data rates were fast enough to send lots of really clear pictures of products; and Bezos was smart enough to build one heck of a server farm. Now IIRC he is selling ~500,000 different products.

Some big companies did try: A standard view of IBM inside IBM was that it was "not a computer company or an electronics company but a marketing company and would be in grocery stores tomorrow if they saw an opportunity." That is, IBM was not tied down to just computers or just their 360/370 mainframes. Hmm, grocery stores? Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, and Amazon? Now with the Internet, computing for taxi companies, etc. there's a shot at grocery stores! But groceries aside, early on GE did try transistors and computers and were ambitious enough to play a big role in MULTICS. Then GE was about as well positioned to win in the future of computing as IBM, DEC, Univac, Burroughs, etc. IBM's Watson lab was into "wearable" computing in the 1980s -- compare with Apple's "wearable" computing now. Same for AI. IBM was doing data science way back, e.g., the IBM Scientific Subroutine Package and their Optimization Subroutine Library. Now IBM owns SPSS, the old statistical package for the social sciences, that is, good coverage of linear multi-variate statistics. Early efforts? Yes. Good, winning results now? Mostly no.

IBM and the Internet: Early on IBM had TCP/IP on a chip. Long IBM was supplying core chips to both Cisco and Juniper. And shockingly at one time IBM was running all the Internet on an NSF contact. Amazing: At one time IBM had all of the Internet and now, as far as I can see, they have nearly none of it. And for social computing (e.g., Facebook), IBM had Prodigy. Since Prodigy was jointly with Sears, they had a path to Amazon.

A lucky horse can find water or be led to water, but it takes still more to have him drink. For both GE and IBM, I put much of the blame of "the myth of the generalist manager".