Magnetic

8From Magnetic to Irrelevant

The Greatest Threat

In a world that doesn't just change quickly, but continuously, the greatest threat to your marketplace viability may very well be irrelevance. The graveyard of failed businesses is filled with companies that went from magnetic to irrelevant. It can be a gradual slide into irrelevance in which the company sees customers and revenue slipping away little by little, or it can be a sudden realization one day that it's just over—you simply stopped mattering.

Witness Radio Shack's long, slow, painful slide from magnetic to irrelevant.

It was kind of like the old story of putting a frog in a pan of water that slowly, degree by degree, became hot enough to kill him. The frog never jumped out because it was so gradual. Don't be the frog. Take action with your business long before the water's too hot!

Wild for CB Radios

It's likely that very few people reading this are old enough to remember CB radios, but trust me, it was a wildly popular fad in the late 1960s. Radio Shack not only jumped on that train but was the locomotive for it. Tens of thousands of people flocked to Radio Shack stores to get their CB radio, and the company was not only relevant, but vitally relevant to this huge consumer trend.

When CB radios began to lose popularity, Radio Shack was ahead of the curve and totally relevant in the next great consumer electronics craze, the personal computer. Again, not many remember the days of the TRS-80, the first mass-produced ...