Why Good Companies Keep Making the Same Mistakes

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

In 2008, Donald Keough, former president of Coca-Cola, wrote a book that should have been required reading for every business leader. It wasn’t called “How to Succeed.” It was called “The Ten Commandments for Business Failure.”

Keough had led Coca-Cola through one of its most successful eras—and one of its worst. He watched the New Coke disaster unfold from the inside. He saw how smart, well-intentioned people could drive a company off a cliff. And he saw the same patterns repeat across dozens of iconic American businesses.

His book was a warning. These are the mistakes that kill companies: Be inflexible. Isolate yourself. Assume infallibility. Love your bureaucracy. Don’t take time to think, and Quit taking risks.

That was years ago. The companies he warned about—Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Yahoo—ignored the advice. They’re either gone or shadows of what they once were.

Here’s what’s unsettling: many businesses today are making the same mistakes, for exactly the same reasons. And if you’re leading a team or running a business right now, you need to understand why this keeps happening – and how to avoid becoming the next cautionary tale.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

Every failed company Keough studied had one thing in common: they stopped focusing on what customers needed and started protecting how they’d always done business.

Kodak invented digital photography but couldn’t let go of its film business. Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 million in 2000 but passed because streaming would require abandoning everything they knew. Nokia dominated mobile phones but couldn’t abandon its button-based interface fast enough when the iPhone arrived.

The pattern is always the same: the world changes. Customers’ needs evolve. But companies keep doing what worked before, convinced that the process that brought success will continue to deliver it.

Until it doesn’t.

Why This Is Happening Again Right Now

If you’re a business leader over 40, you’re probably making the same mistakes right now, for the same reasons those iconic companies did. Not because you’re incompetent, but because the world changed fundamentally in the last five years.

COVID changed how people work, shop, and live. Millennials and Gen Z have become the majority of your workforce and customer base. AI arrived to make the new expectations achievable. These three forces rewrote the rules of business.

And just like Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia, many leaders are responding by protecting their processes instead of adapting to the new reality.

Here’s what that looks like today:

Quit Taking Risks – Oscar Wilde once said, “The world belongs to the discontented.” Becoming too comfortable with your success leads to the other commandments of business failure.

Being Inflexible – Insisting on in-person presence because “that’s how we build culture,” even as your best remote workers leave and you can’t attract younger talent.

Loving Your Bureaucracy – Maintaining approval processes and meeting structures that made sense when information moved slowly, while more agile competitors move faster.

Assuming Infallibility – Dismissing younger employees’ suggestions as inexperienced, not recognizing they might be seeing the new reality more clearly than you are.

Not Taking Time to Think – Executing the playbook that used to work without stopping to ask whether it still applies.

Isolating Yourself – Surrounding yourself with people who validate your approach, while those who see things differently have stopped pushing back.

These are Keough’s warnings from 1993, playing out again in 2026.

The Real Problem: Process Over Content

Here’s what these mistakes have in common: they confuse process with content.

Steve Jobs identified this pattern years ago when explaining why great companies lose their way. Content is what you’re trying to achieve: satisfied customers, engaged employees, and profitable growth. Process is how you achieve it – your methods, systems, and standard practices.

When a business succeeds, there’s a dangerous tendency to assume the process is what made it successful. So, you institutionalize it. You turn “how we did it” into “how we always do it.” You build bureaucracy around protecting the process.

But the process only worked because it served the content—it delivered what customers wanted, it engaged employees, and it solved real problems. When circumstances change, and the old process no longer delivers the content, you face a choice: adapt the process or protect it?

Most companies, and most leaders, choose to protect the process. Because it’s familiar. It’s proven. Abandoning it feels risky.

But protecting the process when circumstances have changed is the riskiest move of all.

What Changed and What Didn’t

So how do you know when to stick with proven methods and when to abandon them?

What hasn’t changed:

• Customers want value, quality, and good service
• Employees want to feel respected, valued, and fairly compensated
• Trust matters in relationships
• Leadership requires integrity

These are the fundamentals – the content. They’re timeless.

What has changed:

• How customers define “good service” (instant, personalized, frictionless)
• What employees expect from work (flexibility, purpose, transparency)
• How trust gets built (authenticity matters more than tenure)
• How quality work gets done (AI handles execution, humans provide judgment)
• How leadership gets demonstrated (accessibility matters more than hierarchy)

These are the methods – the process. They evolve.

The companies that failed confused the two. Kodak thought film was photography. Blockbuster thought stores were for movie rentals. Nokia thought buttons were phones. They were wrong. And that mistake killed them.

How to Avoid the Same Fate

If you want to avoid becoming the next Kodak, separate process from content, and be willing to abandon the process when it no longer serves the content.

Audit your sacred cows. For each standard practice, ask, “What outcome is this supposed to achieve?” Then: “Is this still the best way to achieve that outcome?” If you can’t articulate the outcome, it’s bureaucracy—kill it. If the outcome matters but the method is outdated, change the method.

Listen to the people who push back. When younger employees suggest different approaches, resist the urge to explain why they don’t understand. Ask: “What outcome are you trying to achieve? Why would this work better?” Listen to what they have to say.

Watch for the warning signs. If you find yourself avoiding decisions that feel risky, insisting “this is how we do things,” dismissing feedback because you’ve been successful for years, or adding more process to fix problems – you’re protecting process over content.

Test assumptions, don’t defend them. The world has changed. Your assumptions might not hold anymore. Instead of defending them, test them. Try new approaches. Be willing to be wrong.

The leaders who survived past disruptions weren’t the ones who were right. They were the ones who adapted fastest when they realized they were wrong.

What This Really Means

Everything you learned about business, everything that made you successful—some of it still applies, and some of it doesn’t.

The challenge is staying close enough to customers and employees to see when the old methods stop working. Being humble enough to admit when your proven approach is failing. Being brave enough to abandon processes that brought you success when they’re no longer serving the purpose.

Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Yahoo—they all had years of warning. Customers were telling them. Employees were telling them. The data was telling them. They just couldn’t hear it over the sound of their own certainty.

The Choice You’re Making

Right now, you’re making the same choice those companies made.

The world has changed. Your customers changed. Your employees have changed. The expectations changed.

You can adapt—change your processes while staying focused on delivering value. Or you can protect how you’ve always done things until there’s nothing left to protect.

One path requires humility, flexibility, and courage to abandon what worked in favor of what works now. The other requires nothing—just keep doing what you’ve always done.

But thirty years from now, when someone writes about the companies that failed during the COVID-AI-generational convergence, which side of the story do you want to be on?

Keough gave us the blueprint. The companies he warned about ignored it. You don’t have to.

The question is: are you protecting the process, or are you delivering the content?

Because only one of those keeps you relevant.

If this perspective helped you see something differently or clarified something you’ve been struggling with, let me know in the comments—I would genuinely like to hear what landed with you. Your perspective helps me write better articles for professionals like you. If you know someone else wrestling with these same questions, share it with them.

Note: This article reflects observations about workforce dynamics and organizational knowledge based on industry-wide practices and publicly available business information.