Success can be a drag…
by. Anthony Demangone
When can success be a problem? When it leads to hubris so powerful, that it blinds you to risks.
That’s one of the lessons from a study that looked at the failure of Nortel.
In 2000, Nortel was the 9th most valuable company on the planet. A decade later? Poof, it was gone.
The study, highlighted in the article I linked to, found three main reasons for the failure.
- Nortel’s focus on growth in the 90’s hurt its ability to innovate.
- After the tech bubble burst, it cut costs to the point where it alienated its customers.
- Perhaps the biggest problem? Its early success led to arrogance.
This comes from the article:
Many of Nortel’s problems came from a culture that got baked into the company long before it was in trouble. In the ’70s, it could essentially tell customers what technology they needed, and charge what it wanted. The company had extraordinary success doing exactly that.
continue reading »