Blockbuster, HMV and Kodak. The names that have become shorthand for corporate blindness – three giants that failed to see the seismic shift coming and were flattened by it. It's a satisfying story: hubris meets disruption, disruption wins, curtain falls. Except that isn't quite what happened.
Kodak had a working digital camera in 1975. Blockbuster spent most of the 2000s watching Netflix grow, launching its own online rental service, even beating Netflix to subscriber growth for a spell, before a leadership dispute in 2007 knocked the strategy off course. HMV's leadership saw digital downloads coming years before the company entered administration in 2013.
Years, in Kodak's case decades, of a widening gap between what the world was doing and what the strategy assumed, quietly tolerated until there was no runway left to close it. The ending was fast; the failure wasn't. None of these were failures of foresight. They were failures of hubris, unwillingness to face the sunk costs of in-train investments, and pace. That distinction matters more than the now-hackneyed cautionary tales of their demise often tell, because it changes what Boards should actually be watching for. The risk most businesses face today isn't the sudden shock – the fraud, the product recall, the single bad bet. It's the slower and much harder to spot possibility that the strategy itself has quietly stopped matching the world it was written for, and that everyone in the room is too busy admiring the plan to notice.
Let’s call it what it is: a quiet liability. Not a crisis, but a rot that builds in the gap between how fast markets, technology, geopolitics and customer expectations are moving, and how fast the strategy is being re-tested against them. Left unaddressed, it might not be immediately noticeable. It emerges gradually as competitors quietly out-innovate, a customer segment migrates away, a cost base becomes uncompetitive – until the numbers catch up all at once, and by then it looks a great deal like the Kodak story.
The conventional model for keeping strategy current is the Annual Strategy Offsite: trends reviewed once a year, the plan refreshed, risks logged, the Board reassured, everyone home for a gin and tonic (if they’re lucky – or a hideous team-building exercise over a board dinner if they’re not). It's not a bad discipline. It's simply built for a world that no longer exists – one where change arrived in a single dominant vector at a time, and a year was a reasonable unit of review. Today's uncertainty is structural and simultaneous: economic, geopolitical, technological, ecological and social pressures moving together and often amplifying each other. A strategy reviewed once a year is being asked to survive twelve months of a world that no longer holds steady for that long.
The better frame isn't a better annual offsite. It's meeting uncertainty head-on with genuine planning, rather than logging it as a risk and leaving it until the next scheduled review. This is precisely what the Uncertainty Planning stage of Perigon’s Sustainable Strategy System is built to do: time set aside for genuinely high-quality thinking about the strategic options open to the business and what they would mean in practice, using scenario analysis to stretch the assumptions the plan depends on, and pre-mortems to ask, before the fact, how this could fail and what we'd wish we'd seen sooner. The output is a set of Early Warning Indicators that feed straight back into the wider strategy process, so a shift in the world produces a specific response rather than the topic of a ‘blue sky’ session nobody acts on.
None of this is a call to constant reinvention. The point isn't to be flighty, changing course at every headline. It's the opposite: a disciplined use of the time and tools so that when a signal is flagged, the Board has already done the thinking and can move capital and attention to what now matters more, before the market forces the admission on far worse terms. This is where it really matters: dynamism is a Board that can kill a bet on its own timetable; indecision is a Board that only discovers a bet is dead when someone else has already taken the ground.
This is also, notably, not a bigger burden on management's time – done well, it's the same attention the Board already gives strategy, invested in genuinely good planning and sharp Early Warning Indicators rather than a comfortable slide deck. The frequency of the conversation is then set by the signals themselves, not the calendar: once the EWIs are in place, it's the quality of the thinking behind them – and the willingness to act on what they say – that does the work, not how often the Board meets.
The question to focus on isn't whether your strategy looks right in the room. Kodak's did too, for a long time. It's this: what is the one signal that would tell us we are already living our own Kodak moment – and if it appeared on a slide next quarter, would we recognise it, or would we, like many Boards before us, explain it away as noise?
