When I was a teenager, my Friday night ritual was a slow walk through the aisles of the local Blockbuster. I had no idea I was watching the last days of an empire. Blockbuster, in the late 1990s, was the undisputed king of home entertainment. Nine thousand stores. Sixty thousand employees. Almost zero ability to imagine a future that did not include all of that.
My kids do not know what Blockbuster was. Because Blockbuster does not exist anymore.
This is the most-told story in business school for a reason, and the most-misunderstood for the same reason. People remember "Blockbuster lost to Netflix," and they file it under "they did not see the disruption coming." That is not what happened. They saw it. They had the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars in 2000 and laughed Reed Hastings out of the room. The disruption was visible. They refused to act on it.
That is the part you should be afraid of. Not that you will fail to see the change. That you will see it, and the sentence "but this is how we have always done it" will be louder in your head than the data on the screen.
The sentence that kills companies
The most expensive sentence any business owner can say is, "but this is how we do it." It comes out of mouths that are otherwise smart and hardworking. It almost always feels reasonable in the moment. It is usually defended with an appeal to experience. "I have been doing this for twenty years. I know what works."
That is exactly the problem. You knew what worked. The world does not particularly care what worked.
Apple was a desktop computer company. Then an MP3 player company. Then a phone company. Today, around seventy percent of their revenue comes from products that did not exist when most of their executives joined. They cannibalized their own iPod with the iPhone. The willingness to make the previous version of yourself obsolete is not a personality trait. It is a practiced discipline.
Blockbuster did not have it. Kodak did not have it. Borders did not have it. Each one of those companies died with smart executives in the building who had spent decades being right about the previous version of the market and were now being wrong about the current one.
You are not exempt because your business is smaller. The opposite. The smaller you are, the faster the change can take you out, because you do not have the cushion of nine thousand stores to absorb a few quarters of denial.
My agency's near-miss
I want to tell you about my own version of this, because I want you to know I am not writing from a perch.
For years, my agency built websites on WordPress. We were good at it. WordPress was the standard. Our team had years of accumulated expertise. Our pricing was tuned to it. Our internal processes were built around it. WordPress was, in every sense, "how we do it."
A few years back, I started to feel something shift. The sites we were producing were great. The platform underneath them was getting heavier, slower, more bloated, and harder to maintain over time. Newer technologies were emerging that did the job faster, cheaper, and with a better experience for the end user. I started to talk about it internally. I floated the idea of moving off WordPress as our default platform.
The reaction inside the building, and outside of it from peer agency owners, was almost a perfect echo of what the Blockbuster boardroom must have sounded like. "But our whole stack is built on it." "But our team knows it." "But the clients are fine with it." "It works." All of those things were true. They were also irrelevant.
I made the call to start moving. Not all at once, because that would have been reckless. But the new defaults shifted. The new training shifted. The new sales conversations shifted. We took a deliberate cost in the short term, in retraining and in some friction with existing clients, in exchange for a better foundation in the long term. The peer agencies that laughed at the call are now mostly trying to make the same shift, six to eighteen months behind us. Six months of head start in a fast-moving market is the difference between leading a category and surviving in one.
I do not tell that story to make myself look prescient. I tell it because the moment of decision was not hard because the data was unclear. The data was clear. The moment was hard because the sentence "but this is how we do it" was loud in my own head, and I had to choose to ignore it.
action
1. Block five quiet minutes this week with a piece of paper. 2. Write three things you do because that is how you have always done them. 3. For each, ask: if I were starting from scratch today, would I still do it this way? 4. Pick the one no-answer with the highest leverage in the next 90 days. 5. Say it out loud to one other person, then change it before year end.
Blockbuster is a story because they did not. You do not have to be one.
