“Active inertia” : a key-concept to understand corporate failures, including innovation-related failures ?
There are people you don’t forget. I was lucky enough to have Don Sull as strategy professor for the two years of my MBA at London Business School ; he was obviously among the smart ones (he flew shortly after to Harvard Business School). In 1997, I heard him explain his "active inertia" concept. He expanded on it in his 2003 book "Revival of the fittest". What is it about ? It’s the astonishing plain idea that a company can put its own existence at risk by pursuing harder recipes which previously brought success, while the environment has changed.
The Compaq history can be read that way :