Courage to Execute: What elite U.S. military units can teach business about leadership and team performance

Chapter 8

The Courage to Execute: A Smart Bias toward the Right Action

If you have any doubt that business is combat, look at two companies who've shared the military story with countless Americans: Blockbuster and Netflix. In 2000, Blockbuster boasted 3,000 stores across the country and raked in revenue of roughly $5 billion. It was a goliath, the bane of local video stores. Five years later, it was struggling. At the end of the decade it filed for bankruptcy, then sold for a paltry $228 million.

Perhaps one of the early signs of Blockbuster's future came when they declined to buy a two-year-old DVD-by-mail company for the price of $50 million—a price that a company as large and profitable as Blockbuster could have easily afforded.¹ Five years later, that start-up company, Netflix, mailed out 1 million DVDs every day, was publicly traded, and raked in more than $500 million.² And it was eating Blockbuster's lunch.

Time waits for no man and consumers wait for no company. Heavily vested in its in-store business model and with millions in real estate on the books, Blockbuster tried holding on to consumer desires of the past. One business writer used a military analogy, comparing Blockbuster's faith in its retail stores to 1940 France's faith in the Maginot Line. Some inside the company had a hunch the market was changing, but they didn't act. Nexflix did, and because of their bias for action, they outflanked Blockbuster's store-based strategy just like the German army attacked France ...