Policies and control processes became so foundational to our work that those who were great at coloring within the lines were promoted, while many creative mavericks felt stifled and went to work elsewhere. I was sorry to see them go, but I believed that this was what happens when a company grows up.

Then two things occurred. The first is that we failed to innovate quickly. We had become increasingly efficient and decreasingly creative. In order to grow we had to purchase other companies that did have innovative products. That led to more business complexity, which in turn led to more rules and process.

The second is that the market shifted from C++ to Java. To survive, we needed to change. But we had selected and conditioned our employees to follow process, not to think freshly or shift fast. We were unable to adapt and, in 1997, ended up selling the company to our largest competitor.

Successful institutions almost always develop strong cultures that reinforce those elements that make the institution great. They reflect the environment from which they emerged. When that environment shifts,it is very hard for the culture to change. In fact, it becomes an enormous impediment to the institution’s ability to adapt.

This is doubly true when a company is the creation of a visionary leader. A company’s initial culture is usually determined by its founder’s mindset—that person’s values, beliefs, preferences, and also idiosyncrasies. It’s been said that every institution is nothing but the extended shadow of one person.

I suspect that many successful companies that have fallen on hard times in the past—including IBM, Sears, General Motors, Kodak, Xerox, and many others—saw perhaps quite clearly the changes in their environment. They were probably able to conceptualize and articulate the need for change and perhaps even develop strategies for it. What I think hurt the most was their inability to change highly structured, sophisticated cultures that had been born in a different world.

None of this improvement came from a deep entrepreneurial insight or from innovation. It was all just management—just undoing the accumulated clutter and waste from years of entropy at work.

5. Taking Flight

It would seem in retrospect that each of the books Morrison published in 1974 turned on the notion that accepted ideas needed to be challenged. Much in the same way Herskovit’s collection upended long-accepted ideas about race and culture, the final book Morrison published that year, Land’s Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation, decried conventional wisdom and prevailing business practices and promoted, instead, proactive approaches to organizational change and growth. At the core of Land’s argument was the claim that risk aversion and safe-decision making were guarantees for stagnation and death.