Ours is an argument for ideas that become us. Illustratory is a statement by a well-known management author who lamented the difficulty of “escaping one’s past ideas”. Viewing himself a prisoner, his past published ideas had devoured him: they limited his ability to imagine or credibly...

This is a real story about how a group of highly innovative and highly committed employees sought to rescue a failing telecom giant while they thought AT&T still had its chance. The signs of radical change in the telecom industry were in the air. The management did not seem to be able to come to...

Summary Popular parlance suggests that 'you learn more from your failures than from your successes'. However, when it comes to failed innovations in organizations, we find that the proverb is not always true. We suggest that instead, failure may often lead to innovation trauma, an inability to...

Rigidity has been described as a major contributor to both organizational failure and survival. In this essay, we seek to clarify the position of rigidity in organizational adaptation by making some conjectures about exploratory patience, organizational failure, and the nature of learning for...