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The success trap (and some ideas how to get out of it)
Tunnel vision – “in the end, there is only flux”
“Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the
brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to
politics. When a good idea is run through the lters and compressors of
ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value
but in its new dogmatic conguration produces effects the opposite of
those for which it originally was intended.” Tom Robbins, in Still Life with
Woodpecker.
Research by Professors Allen Amason from the University
of Georgia and Ann Mooney from the Stevens Institute of
Technology, for example, has shown that CEOs of rms with
relatively high performance were signicantly more likely to
interpret changes in their business environment as a threat than
CEOs of poorly performing companies, who more often inter-
preted changes as a positive thing.
And this is understandable. If you are the top performer in your
industry, any change looks like a threat, because things can only
Business Exposed32
get worse; you like things just the way they are, thank you very
much! In contrast, if you currently look like a sucker because
you’re the CEO of a company that is not performing very well in
comparison to your peers, any change is welcome. It represents
an opportunity for things to be altered, and your only way is up.
Allen and Ann also showed that, as a consequence, the top
managers of the high-performing companies were much less
comprehensive in formulating a response to the strategic change;
they didn’t spend much time evaluating potential alternative
courses of action, they didn’t do much research and analysis, and
they sure as hell didn’t seek any outside help or opinion.
Most likely, executives in such a situation are going to try to
continue as is, resist change or minimize its impact. However,
if the environmental change is profound, ignoring it is likely
not going to work! And this is a problem of all times. In the
1970s, the Swiss watch industry, which was superb at making
mechanical watches, invented the quartz watch but they didn’t
do anything with it. And when companies from Hong Kong and
Japan ooded the market with cheap quartz watches they denied
the relevance of the change till they had a near-death experience.
Around the same time, tire-maker Firestone responded to the
introduction of radial technology by trying to beef up its
production of bias tires (their nancials continued to plunge
until they were put out of misery and acquired by competitor
Bridgestone). More recently, traditional newspaper companies
fought news-reporting on the Internet by suing dot-coms and
naïvely copying and pasting their own paper on a website,
while Kodak for a long time tried to ignore digital photography,
mourning its spectacular margins on photo-lm.
I guess that’s why you could call it
old-fashioned tunnel vision. When your
company is hugely successful, you don’t
want to see that the world is changing.
And if you then, eventually, are forced
to incorporate the new technology (or
whatever it is that is rocking your world),
‘‘
When your
company is hugely
successful, you don’t
want to see that the
world is changing.
’’
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