Technology & Innovation

Scare stories for suits

April 13, 2012

Global

April 13, 2012

Global
Anonymous Writer

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I’ve recently developed an unhealthy obsession with tales of corporate woe. The traditional case study presents a shining exemplar of business success, but increasingly I find myself drawn to a sub genre that specialises in gargantuan flops and failures

It seems I am not alone, judging from the number of column inches, blogs and comments devoted to Kodak's sad decline in recent months. This culminated with one of the biggest and most innovative businesses of the 20th century filing for bankruptcy.

What gives this story extra resonance is the palpable sense of helplessness among Kodak’s leadership. It’s a cautionary tale for all managers terrified by what disruptive technology might do to them. For there was nothing surprising about Kodak's decline. The company foresaw the threat posed by digital cameras decades ago, and even invested in a (somewhat half-hearted) attempt to become a leader in digital imaging. Despite this, management couldn't or wouldn't take the painful decisions required to create a different future for Kodak. I guess it’s never easy to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. 

Right now there are plenty of other scare stories to give managers the willies. If Kodak had all the inevitability of watching a car crash play out in slow motion, the travails of Blackberry-makers RIM gives rise to a different anxiety complex. Only a year or two ago RIM was being feted as a pioneer. Here was a company lauded for its brilliance in user-led design, whose users have now started to desert the company in droves. How quickly the mighty keep falling.

The tech sector is full of these stories. The once all-conquering Nokia is again making headlines this week for all the wrong reasons. But look back far enough and you’ll find examples in most industries. Some of these tales take on epic proportions: Andrew Sorkin’s blockbuster Too Big to Fail dramatised the demise of Lehman Brothers. Barbarians at the Gate, the grand-daddy of all the business docu-dramas, provides a gripping narrative of a CEO's defeat in the battle over the fate of RJR Nabisco. Some of these stories even hit the big screen: “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, a documentary about Enron's dodgy dealings, has a cult following to this day.

Why the current fixation with these gruesome business autopsies?  It is not that I take an exceptional degree of pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. As a journalist brought up in the old-school world of print, I’m as afflicted by obsolescence anxiety as the next man. Nor do I particularly expect to gain practical insight from these histories, despite the best efforts of the analysts to turn a company’s specific trials into didactic lessons for MBAs.

No, I think it’s the vision of business at its rawest that gets people’s attention. It’s a moment when the corporate mask, that meticulously managed image, falls away …and instead we get a rare glimpse into the ego-bashing battles that at any given time could be taking place in several boardrooms around the world.

Not that I don’t like a happy ending, you understand. There is always a chance of a twist in the tale. The company that finds itself reeling on the ropes, written off by all the pundits…that then like Rocky Balboa pulls its battered form off the floor to make the most improbable of comebacks. Yes, in Apple the business commentators got the perfect turnaround story to keep their blogs filling up with “learnings” for years to come. 

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