How can a company’s signature move, the very thing that propelled it to greatness, morph into a millstone around its neck. It’s the corporate equivalent of your favourite band (U2), whose encore is always, inevitably, that one song from decades ago (Beautiful Day).
The curse of the golden goose
Every successful organisation has a golden goose. That one core competency – perhaps dazzling efficiency, mesmerising marketing, constant communication or technical wizardry – lays the golden eggs. This is The Trick. Profits roll in, classes fill up, shelves are emptied, plaudits accumulate, and high-fives happen. They all love The Trick. The temptation, naturally, is to keep feeding the goose and expecting an endless supply of gold. The problem arises when the market decides it fancies duck eggs, not golden eggs. The organisation, utterly besotted with its goose and the established routine of egg collection, keeps presenting the same old thing with unwavering conviction. This isn’t just sticking to your knitting; it’s insisting on knitting woolly jumpers when everyone is getting ready for their summer holiday. The golden goose competency, through sheer, relentless over-application, becomes the Albatross Incompetency. The Trick stops working.
Why the favourite trick goes stale
How does this transformation from indispensable strength to embarrassing liability happen? It’s a blend of organisational arthritis and predictable mental tics.
Organisational factors,
the comfort blanket of success:
- Complacency & Inertia: Success is warm. Why venture into the cold, uncertain world of new things when the existing competency feels safe and proven? The organisation develops procedures, structures, and a culture perfectly optimised for The Trick. Changing this is like asking a deeply hungover person to take up parkour.
- Path Dependency: You built the world’s best infrastructure for The Trick. You hired and trained people exclusively for The Trick. Your suppliers are geared up for The Trick. Every past decision makes doing anything but The Trick seem preposterously tricky and expensive. You’re stuck in a well-worn groove, even if it’s leading nowhere useful.
- Resource Allocation Rigidity: The department managing The Trick always has the best charts showing past glories and predictable returns. They get the lion’s share of the budget. Trying to fund something new and unproven feels like betting the farm on a three-legged horse, so innovation gets starved in favour of polishing the old routine.
- Identity Crisis: “We are the company that does The Trick.” It’s on the T-shirts, the website, the CEO’s speeches. Questioning The Trick feels like corporate treason, an attack on the very soul of the enterprise.
- Metric Fixation: You measure what you treasure. If all your KPIs are about perfecting The Trick, managers will, quite rationally, focus only on that. The system rewards refinement of the known, not exploration of the unknown.
Cognitive biases,
the brain’s stubborn refusal to see:
Our minds are often the chief architects of this rigidity, clinging to the familiar like barnacles to a rock.
Manifestations & consequences,
the ghosts of strategies past:
The corporate landscape is haunted by the ghosts of companies stuck on repeat:
- Blockbuster: The Trick was managing vast physical stores and inventory efficiently. They viewed streaming not as a new paradigm, but as an annoying niche they could perhaps bolt onto their existing model.
- Kodak: The Trick was chemistry – sublime mastery of film and photographic paper. Digital was a curiosity they invented but couldn’t embrace because it threatened the lucrative chemical empire.
- Nokia: The Trick was durable hardware and efficient global manufacturing. They saw smartphones as just phones needing better hardware, fatally underestimating the revolutionary power of software ecosystems (apps!).
The Fallout: When the favourite trick becomes a liability, the consequences are grim: haemorrhaging market share, watching nimbler rivals dance rings around you, pouring good money after bad to prop up the obsolete, a deathly silence where innovation should be, and, ultimately, fading into irrelevance or administration.
Smart people,
standing on their shoulders
This isn’t just anecdotal; smarter strategic thinkers have long warned of this:
- Core Rigidities (Leonard-Barton): She gave it a name, showing how those capabilities become structural and psychological barriers. We’re just adding that overreliance on one capability is often the prime culprit.
- Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen): His work perfectly illustrates the outcome – successful firms ignoring disruptive threats because they’re too busy pleasing current customers with The Trick. The cognitive biases explain why they stay blinkered.
- Competency Trap (Levitt & March): This describes getting stuck perfecting The Trick while the world moves on. Our focus is on the addiction to that single trick as the entry point to the trap.
- Dynamic Capabilities (Teece et al.): This is the antidote. It’s about building the meta-skill of changing tricks – sensing when the old one is failing, seizing new opportunities, and reconfiguring the organisation accordingly. It’s about strategic agility, not just operational excellence in one area.
Contextual factors,
when the trap springs faster
Of course, it’s not uniform. The speed of the industry matters immensely – tech’s one-trick ponies get put out to pasture far quicker than brick manufacturers. A culture that allows awkward questions (“Are we sure the goose is still golden?”) helps, as does leadership that spends more time looking out of the window than admiring the internal machinery. And some tricks are harder to unlearn than others, especially those baked into expensive, tangible assets.
Clever antidotes,
avoiding fossilisation:
How to avoid becoming a corporate fossil, forever defined by yesterday’s hit?
- Cultivate Paranoia (in a healthy way): Actively look for signs that The Trick is losing its magic. Encourage scouts to report back from the frontiers.
- Embrace Ambidexterity: Ring-fence resources for experimenting with new tricks, even while the old one pays the bills. Protect these fledgling efforts from the dominant logic.
- Mandate Diversity of Thought: Actively seek out dissenters, sceptics, and people with different backgrounds who won’t just nod along with the prevailing wisdom about The Trick.
- Plan Adaptively: Treat strategy less like a stone tablet and more like a living document. Build in regular reviews and be prepared to pivot.
- Reward Clever Failure: Make it safe to try new things that don’t pan out. Learning what doesn’t work is valuable intelligence. Focus on learning velocity, not just short-term results.
- Develop Dynamic Capabilities: Make learning to change the core competency. Get good at sensing shifts, making bold decisions, and transforming the organisation before you’re forced to.
Our conclusion:
beyond the one-hit wonder
The journey from core competency to core incompetency is paved with good intentions and fuelled by past successes. The danger lies in falling in love with one way of winning, applying it relentlessly and uncritically until it becomes the reason for failure.
True resilience isn’t about having an unbreakable hammer; it’s about having a well-stocked, adaptable toolkit and knowing when to use which tool. It’s about ensuring the golden goose doesn’t become a dead weight by constantly scanning the horizon for what might come next, even when the golden eggs are still piling up. That’s really The Trick.
//A 🐣