Conventional wisdom says protecting your competitive edge means defending what made you successful — the product, the margins, the customer base. Every business school, every board, every incentive structure points in the same direction. And for a while, it works. You have a profitable, efficient machine. Diverting resources away from it to chase something unproven feels reckless, not wise.
Here’s what that view gets backward. Organizations end up protecting past practices rather than the principles behind their success. A practice is just the best available expression of a principle at a given moment in time. The mistake is treating the practice as sacred long after the moment has passed — and somewhere in that confusion, the principle gets lost entirely.
BlackBerry didn’t protect what made it valuable — a secure, reliable way to stay connected to what mattered most. It protected the keyboard. The physical click, the corporate networks, the sense that this was a serious tool for serious people. Those were practices, not the principle. By the time the iPhone made all of that look outdated, BlackBerry’s leadership still couldn’t see the difference between the two. Nokia’s collapse follows the same line if you look for it.
I’ve watched smaller, quieter versions of this play out. Decisions that could be made in fifteen minutes and executed in a few days instead take months, sometimes years. The deliberation isn’t really about getting it right. It’s stalling dressed up as discipline. Leaders say things like “we want to stay focused on our strengths instead of the competition,” or “let’s wait and watch before we evaluate.” Meanwhile, their own employees are walking out the door to join the competitors they’re supposedly not watching.
Here’s the thing — they usually know. Ask most leaders privately, and they’ll admit the old playbook is fading. So it’s not ignorance keeping them stuck. It’s something closer to fear of losing what they’ve built, or the sheer exhaustion of having to think it all through again after years of not having to.
Which leaves me with a question I can’t answer yet: is it fear or exhaustion — and can you ever actually tell which one you’re looking at from the outside?
One response to “Mistaking the Method for the Mission”
[…] The practice Anglo American had been protecting was a profitable production model. The principle underneath it — one nobody had named out loud — was that certain lives were worth less than certain revenue targets. […]