| The generals of the American
Civil War fought, or re-fought, the American Revolutionary
War. They used linear tactics best suited to short range weapons
like the bayonet and the smoothbore musket, even though the
weaponry of the 1860s was too powerful and sophisticated for
linear warfare. As a result, there were immense—and
unnecessary— casualties.
The memory of his disastrous venture
into the Balkans [in the Great War] made Winston Churchill
reluctant to press the Normandy Invasion. While FDR encouraged
and pressured him, Churchill kept replaying in his mind the
terrible movie of that other invasion.
In Vietnam, so it's been said, the
Army didn't fight for nine years, it fought for one year nine
times over. After that long war ended, the Army reviewed its
efforts and decided that its officer rotation policy was a
major strategical mistake. One that was responsible for many
tactical loses.
Determined to correct this mistake
and other repeated errors, the Army established the Center
for Army Lessons. At the Center's California base, the Army
studies its past and tries to understand the results.
The Center was established between
Vietnam and Desert
Storm, and the results from the Gulf War indicate that studying
the past mistakes may have paid off. Desert Storm goes down
in history as the first time the Army won the first battle
of a war.
And what does this have to do with
business?
The point is simply that we need to
learn from history, even though we can't expect history to
repeat exactly.
The history of marketing is scarred
with stories of weak tactics that have been replayed and have
carried the team down to defeat.
It's Detroit in the early sixties:
car companies are taking painful hits from new foreign auto
makers who are shipping compact cars into the country. But,
having won the consumer wars of the fifties with mega-monsters,
Detroit rigidly continues on this course and things get tougher.
Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corp's
president and founder, was able to look at the gargantuan
mainframe computer and visualize a rich market for a smaller
machine. DECs mid-range computer raked in the dollars, but
Olsen's vision stopped short of seeing the need for a computer
even smaller than his mid-range and the PC wrote DEC's history.
Haloid Corporation recognized the
power of xerography while companies like IBM, RCA and GE ignored
it. Haloid became Xerox Corporation and grew and grew. Then
Xerox stopped learning...and growing. They overlooked the
technology for the graphical user interface computer, which
was invented at Xerox PARC, along with a little hand held
gadget eventually named a "mouse." And Apple Corporation
walked away with it.
"Oh we tried that once and it
didn't work."
This statement rings out in corporate
meetings at levels high and low. And when you hear it, odds
are it means this: we did it once—and we did it wrong—then
we drew the conclusion it wouldn't work.
It might be wise for companies to
take a lesson from the Army and establish a Center for Company
Lessons. Here the mistakes of the past could be studied with
the aim of understanding the results and with the intention
that the present and future will be free of the misfortunes
of the past.
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