Icarus is a mythical character who was known to have wings of wax. He was feelin

Question

Icarus is a mythical character who was known to have wings of wax. He was feeling quite good about himself and flew too close to the sun despite his father's pleading for him not to do so. There is a well known business book by Canadian strategy scholar Danny Miller called 'The Icarus Paradox'. It is about how success breeds failure in the corporate world. My doctoral dissertation was about Gulf Oil Corporation, one of the largest and most successful oil & gas corporations in the world, that was subsequently forced to be acquired by Standard Oil of California after years of decline. Can you provide an example of a company that suffered the fate of Icarus? What might have been the source of its failure after experiencing success? How can corporations avoid this fate?

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

Example of a company that suffered the fate of Icarus – Nokia Mobile Phone Company.

The sources of its failure after experiencing success are as below

·       Lack of strategic alignment: The Nokia organizations was not having right strategic alignment of the organization and were not able to visualize the future product requirements for the organization, which resulted into failure for a world successful company.

·       Lack in technology management: The Nokia organization could not be able to manage right use of technology at the given market requirements. The technology of mobile phone was changing but Nokia was not able to understand this technology changes in the market.

·       Lack of Product upgradation: Nokia was not able to develop the product suitable to the market and technology changes quickly and place the products in the market, so that they can retain the market, thus resulted in major failure.

·       Lack of expertise in managing market requirements: Nokia could not demonstrate that they have good market intelligence and are capable in managing the market requirements quickly and appropriately.

Corporations can avoid this fate with following processes and approaches as below

·       Corporates needs to have good market intelligence process so that they can keeps understanding the demand of the dynamic market and their changing requirements, so that they can make the necessary changes in their products and services.

·       Strategic and long term management: The corporate needs to have adequate strategic and long term management approaches so that they can visualize future requirements and can place themselves ready for the upcoming changes

·       Manage future product requirements: Corporates needs to develop the capability of understanding the future requirements and their capability to manage the future demands.    

·       Technology Management: Corporates needs to have process to manage the technology changes and upgradation of their products with respect to the technology changes.

·       Continuous Upgrdation: The organization needs to have proper change management process, so that they can have market inputs and the changes can be implemented timely in the organization with the change management process.

·       Quick decision process for changes: The corporate need to be quick in assessing the issues and organize the needful changes in the organization to suit market requirements.

·       Efficiency and effectiveness: needs to be explored by the organization as these are the key elements for long term survival and success of the organization

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