WAY 52Cannibalize Your Success: Winning the future requires you to change the game you are playing.
About the Way
Like the belief that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame sometime in their life—incidentally, a comment not actually said by pop artist Andy Warhol, though often attributed to him—companies that are intent on inventing the future know that today's successful solution will lose its luster at some point. This is true whether a company considers itself a market maker or fast follower. Similarly outside business, long‐standing organizations likewise need to stay relevant as the world around them changes, including their customers.
Getting overly comfortable with success leads to complacency. Kodak offers a cautionary tale. Although Kodak invented the digital camera, the company chose not to commercialize it in fear of jeopardizing its ridiculously profitable film business. By the time Kodak realized its digital camera prototype was a game changer, its competitors Canon and Fujifilm had already established a significant lead in the digital camera market. In 2012, at 131 years old, Kodak was forced to file for bankruptcy protection.1 Ironically, Kodak's founder George Eastman—who died in 1932—avoided complacency twice before, when he switched from a profitable dry‐plate business to film and then when he moved out of black‐and‐white film, which Kodak dominated, to invest in color film.2
When done intentionally, displacing your own success can be a deliberate strategy for ...
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