This week’s feature fables a well-known American company and how it squandered its advantages by ignoring the lessons of the Skunkworks way of doing things. The Bison Herd corporation was fat, happy, and grazing lazily. It had many advantages: 10 million+ online customers, a valuable patent portfolio, a great reputation, top brand name and logo, world class marketing/advertising, a strong balance sheet. Yet it was failing. Every new customer sale lost money. Traditional product lines sales were falling. The management team ruminated on a new technology that was taking the market by storm. They thought that the old way of doing business would change a bit, but there was time to adjust. They had been around for many years and had weathered many disruptions. The competition also thought the technology would change the market, but they reacted more quickly and aggressively. The competitive firms (predators) hunted for new business models as quickly as they could. The new hunting ground would have different margins, customer requirements, and products/services. The predators realized that they could work together to take down the Bison Herd corporation. Instead of allowing Bison Herd to take the lion’s share of the market, the predators figured out how to capture the profit before Bison Herd got to feed. New technology enabled popular features on the predator’s new devices. Customers took to the new brands. The brand loyalty that had supported Bison Herd’s business shifted to their competition. New brands hunted the Bison herd’s customers in multiple patches simultaneously, confusing the company’s management. Soon there were so many new competitive devices on the marketplace that Bison Herd’s ability to introduce new devices priced competitively yet still profitable disappeared. In the old days, they could cross subsidize their products because they sold the razors and the blades. Those days were over. Large Grazing Herd had a technology portfolio without peer. A material and substantial portion of the Herd looked for the best feed, the best lookouts for predators, and the best watering spots. This failed as predators settled for “eat what we can get” of the Herd’s market share and then continued to eat over time as research and development into the old technologies failed to yield sales and margin.
At bankruptcy Large Grazing Herd failed multiple stakeholders in their business ecosystem, their employees, locations, and customers.
Today, almost no consumer under 40 ever bought one of their products. We had a specific company in mind. Who do you think fits this description? Please respond in the comments.
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