How to Kill Your Company
No one is too big to fail. Not your company. Not your department. Not you. I've been studying the autopsies of fallen giants and household names, and it's never some mysterious outside force that took them down. It was internal. Psychological. Preventable. This post is a manual for what not to do. And it lines up almost perfectly with the five stages of decline from Jim Collins’ book, How the Mighty Fall. It’s eerie how consistent the pattern is. Let’s look at some low-hanging fruit. Blockbuster Kodak Yahoo Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success At their peak, these companies were kings. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and made $6 billion a year. Kodak controlled 90% of the film market. Yahoo was the front door of the internet. And they believed the hype. Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of the room when offered a $50M acquisition. Kodak literally invented the digital camera, and then buried it for more than 20 years. Yahoo thought search was benea...