• Digiday, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:32 AM

Kodak, Sears, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Borders are either out of business or a shadow of themselves. 

“How could these leading brands, staffed with smart, diligent people, go from great to gone in less than a generation? These were not dot-bomb fantasies or Madoff-style Ponzi schemes. These were major companies with thousands of employees and significant revenues,” notes the article. The answer: technological disruption, and lack of understanding of their core value proposition. “They woke up every morning and did things without understanding which of those activities were important to their consumers. As a result, their planning process only looked at linear projections of the future with marginal changes. IBM deserves huge credit for being willing to completely overall a huge and still profitable business in the ’90s. It is almost unique in its willingness to do this,” notes the writer. 

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