Rita McGrath
Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his great book “The 7 Rules of Power” declares that “success excuses (almost) everything.” Success also determines which stories about the origins of that success get told and which headlines are buried. This makes it all but impossible to know the real causes for why things worked out the way they did, inhibiting learning.
Human learning is like the scientific method. It requires us to assert a hypothesis, which can be formal or not, conduct an experiment, and see if what we thought would happen happened. We can then adjust our hypothesis to reflect the new facts we have hopefully uncovered.
I wa last week when a participant observed that what killed off Kodak was the digital camera revolution.
meant it. In a fascinating re-telling of the Kodak Story, Ron Adner points us to the real culprit – the improvement in the quality of screens which made printing photographs at home unnecessary.
One fascinating aspect of the Kodak story is that the company was an R&D leader in many technologies that subsequently became important. I describe investments of this kind as creating “real options” in which the risk to make the investment is small, but the benefits if things work out can be huge.
At a high level, the problems described at Kodak are a characteristic of truly breakthrough innovations – the kind that today’s experts think can’t possibly happen. Safi Bahcall describes these as “Loonshots” and argues that they are major sources of human progress, but that we struggle to manage them appropriately, what is missing is the key role of the Sherpa – someone who knits discoveries and the organization together.
