jenk

From Lee Gomes' column in the wall street journal:

Perhaps the best strategic advice for a company is to ignore strategic advice, because all it will be is warmed-over conventional wisdom. Instead, companies should make sure they are on the right side of history, and then try to do whatever it is they do as well as they can.

If that sounds unacceptably passive, consider the tale of Carol Bartz, chief executive of Autodesk, the big engineering software company.

At the height of the dot-com bubble, Ms. Bartz suddenly found herself being left off the sorts of "Most Influential Business Leader" lists she had routinely been included on in the past. The reason: She was ignoring the Internet and stubbornly sticking to her knitting.

Last month, though, a prominent business weekly printed such a list, and Ms. Bartz was once more on it. The reason: She was ignoring the Internet and stubbornly sticking to her knitting.

Same strategy. History had just caught up.

Of course, admitting that you don't know the future is horribly fallible and human. Big companies can't do that...!