How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Thing

James Dean engaged his craft as an actor but his legendary status has more to do with his untimely death.  Yes it is true that James Dean lived fast and died in a sports car, but he was driving at the designated speed on the way to a racing meet, when a fast moving regular driver who did not notice him on the main road, went right into him.  This was at a time when James Dean had offered his services in public service announcements to teach kids the essentials of safe driving - how ironic is that?  For the fault of one careless driver the world lost a great actor.

At Xerox they nearly did ruin a perfectly good thing, but entrepreneurs saw it, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who profited greatly thanks to the innovations they found.  Yet disruptive innovation is actually about doing the "right" thing strategically that does not see that the very thing that gets rejected, is then perfected by another organization, who in those improvements emerge finally as fierce competitors.  Did Sears see Walmart or simply discounted the value of building stores in rural areas?

Being blind about what leads an organization to become swallowed by a disruptive innovation shows us that we can make smart decisions and not know the context of those decisions will consequently be so wrong.  Someone else is shifting the ground under the feet and smart people become dead-men walking.  Worse if the very thing that hurt them could have been fashioned and developed at their own organization.

So it is that those that had something good going on now hijacked or ruined because of the failure of others to understand or more likely exercising a hubris that has no value in execution, other than serving as an execution of things that were actually a good thing, now lost, or at least limping along in a way that it should not.

The question is how do we get smarter about these effects and how can one right-size this?