The Big Why: Why We Are So Quick to Forget
Cloistered decisions take minutes. Their consequences take decades. And between those two time scales lies every great company that did not survive the boardroom that killed i
Why We Are So Quick to Forget
Cloistered decisions take minutes. Their consequences take decades. And between those two time scales lies every great company that did not survive the boardroom that killed it.
Every senior engineer knows the cost of tribal knowledge loss on the shop floor.
The craftsman who retires without a debrief, the materials specialist whose judgment dies with them, the forensic investigator whose pattern recognition was never documented — these losses are the standard vocabulary of modern industrial decline. An entire genre of engineering writing, this column included, exists to name what gets lost when institutions fail to capture the tacit knowledge of their most experienced people.
What the genre does not yet address is that the same loss operates at the executive level, one floor up, and with consequences an order of magnitude larger. The senior executive who retires with no written legacy of what they decided wrongly, and why, is a tribal knowledge evaporation event no less real than the senior machinist who retires without training a replacement. We simply do not name it that way, because we do not expect executive retirement to include an honest accounting of the decisions that did not work.
We should.
We live in a culture drowning in business analysis. The case studies are in every MBA syllabus. The podcasts run three hours long. The business press publishes autopsies within weeks of the event. Every major corporate failure in the last four decades has been dissected, republished, turned into a Harvard Business School case, and absorbed into the general vocabulary of anyone who has sat near a boardroom.
And yet.
The decisions that actually cost great companies their existence — the ones made inside cloistered rooms by small groups of executives insulated from the engineers, insulated from the customer, insulated from the historical record — those are the decisions we remember the least about. The autopsies get written, but they focus on the visible part of the failure, which is the part that happened in the marketplace. The part that happened in the conference room, three years or ten years or fifteen years earlier, is barely described at all. In most cases, we do not know who was in the room, what was said, what was weighed, what was dismissed, or why.
That forgetting is not accidental. It is institutional. It is a feature of how corporations maintain executive continuity. And it is the mechanism by which the next generation of executives walks into the same cloistered room, weighs the same factors, applies the same logic, and kills the next company in exactly the same way.
Why are we so quick to forget?
The Catastrophes We Remember
There are two kinds of corporate catastrophe. The first kind has a customer.
When the customer has a voice, the accountability mechanism works. The press covers the damage. The earnings call becomes a referendum. The CEO takes public ownership, or takes public blame, or takes both. The decision gets reversed or the executive gets replaced. The lesson enters the business vocabulary within the quarter.
Consider the two examples every reader already knows.
In April 1985, Coca-Cola replaced its flagship formula with New Coke. Consumer outrage was immediate, articulate, and visible. Within seventy-seven days the original formula was back on the shelf as Coca-Cola Classic. Business schools made it a case study. The reversal was complete, the accountability was public, and the lesson was absorbed so thoroughly that forty years later a marketing executive who has never touched a soft drink brand can still recite it.
In April 2023, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s flagship beer, Bud Light, ran a partnership campaign that alienated its core drinkers. The sales response was immediate. The brand lost the top-selling-beer-in-America crown it had held for more than two decades. Executives exited. The board commented publicly. Quarterly earnings calls became public accountings of what had been decided and why. Trade publications wrote the long-form retrospectives within months. By the time the dust settled, the broader industry had a new case study and a new set of lessons about how to treat a heritage customer base.
In both cases, the accountability mechanism did its job. The customer voted. The press translated. The market punished. The lesson was preserved. This is what corporate self-correction looks like when the victim is visible.
The Catastrophes We Forget
Now consider two catastrophes of a different kind.
In 1975, a young electrical engineer named Steven Sasson, working at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, assembled the world’s first working digital camera. The device was the size of a toaster, weighed eight pounds, and captured black-and-white images at a resolution of one hundred pixels by one hundred pixels onto a cassette tape. Sasson demonstrated it to Kodak management in 1976. The response, which he has recounted publicly several times since, was curiosity followed by discomfort. Kodak’s business was built on sensitized film. A filmless camera threatened the core of the enterprise. The company filed the patent in 1977, chose not to commercialize the product, and continued to dominate the film market for another two decades. In 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
No executive was publicly named for that 1976 decision. No podium press conference was held. No earnings call addressed it, because the decision never produced a current-quarter effect that would have appeared on an earnings call. The meeting where digital photography was killed at Kodak happened inside a conference room, by people whose names are not in any index of the subsequent bankruptcy coverage, and whose retirement packages were negotiated and delivered long before the consequence fully arrived.
Around the same time, at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, a team of researchers was building the Alto. The Alto had a mouse. It had a graphical user interface. It had bitmapped displays, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing, Ethernet networking, and an embedded laser printer. It was, by any honest measure, the personal computer we are still using today. Xerox’s corporate leadership in the East — focused on the copier business that was the company’s profit engine — looked at the Alto and decided it was an expensive curiosity outside the strategy. When Xerox did commercialize the concept as the Star in 1981, it priced the product at sixteen thousand dollars as part of an integrated office system that required further investment in file servers and laser printers. The Star was a commercial failure. The researchers at PARC watched, over the subsequent three years, as Apple built the Lisa and the Macintosh and created the personal computing industry. Steve Jobs said, years later, that if Xerox had understood what it had, it could have been larger than IBM and Microsoft and Xerox combined.
No executive at Xerox was publicly named for the decision to constrain the Alto. No street was renamed. The accountability mechanism that had worked so efficiently for New Coke and Bud Light did not engage, because the victim of the Alto decision was not a customer who could complain. The victim was the future of Xerox itself. And the future of a corporation has no seat on the earnings call.
These are not obscure examples. Every reader of this column has heard them before. The question is not whether we know these stories. The question is what we do with them. And the answer, so far, is almost nothing.
The V / E / F Pattern
Apply the Vision / Execution / Financial Stability matrix to the four cases and something striking appears.
The visible disasters — New Coke and Bud Light — were Vision failures. The company misread the customer. Execution was fine. Financial stability was intact. The vision error produced a product or a campaign the market rejected on sight, and the rejection was loud enough to force a correction. The V-failure was public, visible, and repaired within months.
The invisible killers — Kodak and Xerox — were something else entirely. The Vision was correct. Kodak literally invented the technology that would eventually destroy it. Xerox literally built the personal computer before the term existed. The Financial Stability was intact — both companies had the cash to commercialize what they had. What failed was Execution, and what produced the execution failure was not incompetence but a specific category of institutional decision made inside a specific kind of room.
That is the pattern worth naming. The catastrophes we remember are Vision errors, correctable through market feedback. The catastrophes we forget are Execution errors, uncorrectable because the market does not see the decision that produced them until the company is already gone.
The Cloistered Room
The catastrophes we forget share one structural feature. They were all decided in a cloistered room.
Here is what I mean by cloistered. The room (a) had a small number of executives in it, (b) did not have the engineers who had built the technology in it, (c) did not have the customer who would eventually reject the decision in it, (d) did not have any representative of the organization’s ten-year strategic future in it, and (e) did not have the institutional record of prior similar decisions having failed in it.
I will add a confession here. I have sat in rooms of that shape. On at least one occasion I watched a decision get made that I believed was wrong, and I did not speak as forcefully as I now wish I had, because the language in the room was the language of prudence, and dissent would have read as naïveté. That is not an excuse. It is a description of how the room functions, from the inside, on the afternoon of a decision that a decade later will look very different from how it looked that day.
That room is the incubator of the catastrophes we forget. Not the marketplace. Not the product line. The room.
The room has a predictable composition. The people in it are senior enough to decide, which means they are far enough from the engineering floor that they cannot read the technical evidence directly. They are responsible enough for the current-year budget that they weigh cost in this year’s terms rather than strategic consequence in the next decade’s terms. They are insulated enough from the customer that the customer’s voice enters the room only as a market research summary, filtered through two layers of middle management. They are disciplined enough in their executive posture that the instinct to ask the engineers in the building what they actually think is suppressed as inefficient.
And most consequentially, the people in that room do not have the archive.
They do not have a folder labeled decisions of this type, historically, have destroyed companies of this scale within the following timeframe. They do not have a briefing document titled the executives who killed digital imaging at Kodak used the following reasoning, and here is the 2012 bankruptcy filing that resulted. They do not have a wall in the conference room displaying the archetypes to watch for in their own deliberation.
They do not have it because nobody built it. And nobody built it because we are too polite to point.
Bad Choices Are Tribal Knowledge Too
We speak about tribal knowledge as if it only lives on the shop floor.
The senior machinist who knows which setup fixture to use for the thin-wall casting, who learned it the hard way on a job that scrapped twelve parts in 1994, and who has never written it down. The materials engineer who knows which supplier’s titanium alloy has a heat-treat response that will not produce the hairline crack, and who carries that knowledge out the door the day they retire. The forensic investigator who knows which failure mode the metallurgy textbook does not describe correctly, and whose judgment dies with them.
Those losses are real. I have written about them at length. I have spent eight years of my forensic practice reconstructing tribal knowledge that was supposed to have been captured and was not.
But there is a layer of tribal knowledge we rarely acknowledge, and it lives in the executive suite. It is the knowledge of which decisions were wrong, and why.
The executive who sat in a 1976 conference room at a great film company and listened as the strategy of not commercializing digital imaging was debated, accepted, and approved — that executive knew things about that meeting that no autopsy has ever captured. They knew who spoke and who did not. They knew which arguments landed and which were dismissed. They knew which person in the room pushed back and whose pushback was overruled. They knew what the language of prudence sounded like in that specific room, on that specific afternoon, from those specific voices.
That knowledge is tribal. It is not written down. It lives in the head of the person who was in the room. And when that person retires, when they leave the company, when they die, the tribal knowledge of what went wrong, and how it went wrong, leaves with them.
The Hall of Fame captures the tribal knowledge of what worked. The retirement speech preserves it. The biography extends it. The street named after the executive at the great engine company is an institutional commitment to remember what that person did right.
No comparable mechanism exists for remembering what an executive did wrong. No retirement speech says and here are the three decisions I now believe were mistakes, and here is what the next generation should watch for so they do not repeat them. No biography ends with and the author spent his last ten years documenting the meetings he wished he had interrupted. No street is named after the person who sat silent when they should have spoken.
This is the asymmetry again, but one layer deeper. We preserve the tribal knowledge of success because the person who owned it is proud of it and the institution benefits from the association. We erase the tribal knowledge of failure because the person who owned it is ashamed of it, the institution is legally exposed by any written account of it, and everyone involved has an incentive to let the record evaporate.
The result is an archive that knows everything about how to succeed and almost nothing about how companies actually fail.
An engineering organization that treated craftsman tribal knowledge the way most corporations treat executive tribal knowledge would be malpractice. We would not accept a factory where every senior machinist walked out the door without a debrief. We accept, as a matter of course, a boardroom where every senior executive walks out the door without one.
The Fame of Shame is not a punishment archive. It is a tribal knowledge archive for the executive floor — the record of what the senior people who were in the room actually learned, in hindsight, about what they got wrong and why. That record does not exist today because no one has asked for it. And no one has asked for it because the culture of executive retirement is built around the written legacy of success and the oral evaporation of everything else.
The young executive walking into a 2026 AI decision has the published memoirs of the executives who got it right. They do not have the debriefs of the executives who got it wrong, because those debriefs were never written, because the executives who owed them are retired in comfortable places far from the consequences, and because the institution that could have asked for them decided, implicitly, that it would rather not know.
That is the loss. Not a marketing disaster. Not a product flop. The permanent evaporation of the one form of tribal knowledge the next generation most needs to inherit.
The Planes, the Engines, and the Cars
The Kodak and Xerox cases are the ones most readers know. They are far from the only ones.
There are airplanes that do not fly, engines that do not run, and cars that are not for sale — all because a person high enough in a chain of command said no, in a cloistered room, about a program that could have been a generational gold mine.
The airplanes. In 2001, Boeing announced the Sonic Cruiser, a near-sonic swept-wing commercial airliner intended to carry passengers at Mach 0.98 across the Pacific. The company displayed it at air shows. Airlines expressed interest. The engineering was credible. In 2002, Boeing quietly canceled the program and redirected the engineering effort into what became the 787. The 787 was a commercially successful aircraft. The Sonic Cruiser was a different kind of aircraft altogether, one that might have reset the commercial aviation speed envelope for the first time since the 1960s. We will never know. The decision to cancel was made inside a room. The reasoning was, in retrospect, rational on paper. But the rationality did not address the question of whether the generational aircraft got killed in exchange for an incremental one. That question was never answered publicly. It was answered inside the room, and the room did not write it down. In the early 1990s, McDonnell Douglas was developing the MD-12, a double-decker long-range widebody intended to compete with what became the Airbus A380. The program was canceled before a prototype flew. McDonnell Douglas was later acquired by Boeing in 1997. The A380 program Airbus built in its place dominated the very-large-aircraft segment for two decades.
The engines. In 1988, at the Farnborough Airshow, GE Aviation ran a demonstrator of the GE36 Unducted Fan on a testbed aircraft. The engine produced measured fuel burn savings of roughly thirty percent compared to conventional turbofans of equivalent thrust class. The demonstration worked. The hardware ran. The savings were real. Oil prices then collapsed through the early 1990s, and the airlines who had been evaluating the technology concluded that thirty percent fuel savings no longer justified the development and certification cost. The program was wound down. The engine design went into a storage facility. In 2021, as jet fuel prices and decarbonization mandates converged, GE and CFM announced the RISE program — an open-rotor engine architecture whose public description is nearly indistinguishable from the GE36. The intervening three and a half decades were lost because a cloistered-room decision in the early 1990s shelved a technology that had already flown, already worked, and already proven its economics. Nobody was publicly named. No board accounting was demanded. The hardware went into storage and the institutional memory went with it.
The cars. In 1996, General Motors released the EV1, a fully electric production passenger car leased to customers in California and Arizona. The vehicle was real. The lease holders were enthusiastic. The infrastructure to support it was being built. In 2003, GM recalled every EV1 from its lease holders and had the fleet crushed. Lease holders who attempted to purchase their vehicles outright were refused. Documentary film crews filmed the vehicles being shredded. The public explanation at the time was that the EV1 was not economically viable as a production vehicle. The internal deliberations that produced that conclusion were not published. What is known is that in 2010 Tesla Motors shipped the Roadster. In 2012 the Model S. In 2017 the Model 3. By 2024, Tesla’s market capitalization alone was larger than General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis combined. The question of whether the 2003 decision to crush the EV1 fleet was a strategic error is, by any honest accounting, already answered. No executive was publicly named. No shareholder lawsuit succeeded in compelling a detailed record of the internal deliberations. The EV1 was crushed, the engineering teams were disbanded, and the tribal knowledge of what General Motors actually understood about electric vehicles in 2003 walked out the door with the engineers who had built them.
Three industries. Three kinds of product. Three cloistered-room decisions. Three graveyards of almost.
Every reader can add their own. The reader in semiconductors is thinking about the program their company canceled in 2019. The reader in pharmaceuticals is thinking about the compound their employer shelved. The reader in industrial chemicals, in power generation, in defense systems, in telecommunications — every reader has their own list of airplanes that did not fly and engines that did not run and products that are not for sale, and every reader is carrying the knowledge that someone high enough in the chain of command said no, and that the record of why is not written down anywhere.
The Time-Scale Mismatch
The cloistered room has one more feature that deserves its own naming.
The decision that happens inside it takes minutes. The consequence of that decision takes decades.
This is the structural mismatch at the heart of everything that follows. A boardroom decides in an hour. A market corrects in three months. A product line fails in two years. A company dies in fifteen. The executive who made the decision is retired by year eight. The archive of why the decision was made is overwritten by year three.
This is how institutions forget. It is not that the forgetting is willful, though in some cases it is. It is that the time scale of executive tenure is shorter than the time scale of the consequence. By the time the bill arrives, the person who ordered the meal is not at the table, the menu has been replaced, and nobody in the current restaurant remembers what was served.
That mismatch is the thing no corporate governance structure has figured out how to solve. The board that could hold an executive accountable for a 1976 decision is not the board that existed in 1976. The shareholders who bear the cost of a 1985 product roadmap are not the shareholders who held the stock when the roadmap was approved. The engineers who are staring at a 2026 product gap caused by a 2014 decision are not the engineers who were in the room when the 2014 decision was made.
The cloistered room is not just insulated in space. It is insulated in time. And the forgetting is, in the end, the forgetting that this double insulation produces automatically.
Why Nobody Names Them
Why are we so quick to forget? Three reasons, each of them structural rather than personal.
The first is continuity of power. The executives who make the cloistered-room decisions are almost always still in positions of authority when the first tremors of consequence appear. Naming them at that point is professionally impossible for anyone inside the institution, legally hazardous for anyone outside it, and unhelpful to the board that is trying to steady the ship. By the time the executives are no longer in power, the consequences have become institutional rather than personal — the company is failing because of conditions, not because of a specific meeting that happened fifteen years earlier — and the individual accountability window has closed.
The second is the language of prudence. The cloistered-room decision is rarely framed as let us destroy the future of this company. It is framed as let us not pursue a speculative technology that threatens our core business. That framing is not dishonest. It is how the decision genuinely appears inside the room, at the moment it is made. The problem is that the language of prudence reads identically to the language of wisdom, which means the reviewer looking back a decade later cannot distinguish the Kodak meeting from every other meeting in which Kodak correctly chose not to pursue a distracting technology. Both meetings used the same vocabulary. Only one of them killed the company.
The third is the absence of a corresponding archive. The Hall of Fame preserves the Neumanns, the Kelly Johnsons, the Steve Jobses. It does not preserve the archetypes, the conditions, or the reasoning patterns that destroyed the companies those heroes worked for. As a result, the young engineer walking into their first major corporation in 2026 has been shown one-half of the institutional record. They have been shown what to emulate. They have not been shown what to survive. The archive they would need in order to recognize the cloistered-room pattern, when it forms in front of them, does not exist.
What a Fame of Shame Would Do
The proposal is not to name individuals. It is to preserve the pattern.
A Fame of Shame — a deliberate institutional archive of the archetypes, the conditions, and the decision-language that has historically produced catastrophe — would change three things.
First, it would give the engineer in the organization a vocabulary for the pattern they are watching form. The young engineer in a modern industrial company, sitting in a program review and watching an executive dismiss an emerging technology with a disparaging metaphor, would have a name for what they are watching. That naming is not a small thing. It is the difference between private discomfort and collective recognition.
Second, it would give the board and the shareholder class a checklist. The question is this meeting a Kodak meeting? is answerable, if the archive exists. It is unanswerable if the archive does not.
Third, it would return some of the time-scale asymmetry back to the executive making the decision. The cloistered-room decision works, in part, because the executive knows the consequences will not land in their tenure. If there were a visible record of similar executives, ten years later, having their decisions quoted back to them by the business press and the next generation of students in the engineering and management schools, the posture inside the room might shift, by even a small amount. That small amount, compounded across every major strategic decision in every major institution, is the margin between a Kodak trajectory and a GE Aerospace one.
The Fame of Shame does not name villains. It names the conditions that produce them.
The Credibility of the System
When blatant criminals do not go to jail, the laws we claim to live by lose their credibility.
The analogy is uncomfortable. It is also exact.
A legal system maintains its authority not because it catches every violation, but because violations of a certain magnitude produce a visible consequence in a public record. The murderer who walks free damages more than the victim’s family. The fraud that goes unprosecuted damages more than the defrauded investor. The damage extends outward, into the confidence of every citizen who concludes, correctly, that the rules as written are not the rules as enforced, and who begins to treat the written rules as theater rather than as binding.
Corporate culture operates on the same mechanism, and fails under the same pressure.
An industrial institution maintains its legitimacy by claiming to operate according to certain values. Stewardship of the company’s long-term interest. Fiduciary duty to the shareholder. Commitment to technical excellence. Care for the next generation of the workforce. Responsibility to the customer and the communities the company operates in. These claims are made explicitly, in annual reports, in executive speeches, in onboarding materials, in the plaques in the lobby.
And these claims are credible exactly to the degree that the institution keeps an honest record of when it failed to live by them.
The Kodak 1976 meeting was not an act of stewardship. The Xerox Alto decision was not an act of fiduciary duty. The shelving of the GE36 demonstrator was not an act of technical excellence. The crushing of the EV1 fleet was not an act of responsibility to the customer. These decisions were their opposite. They were stewardship failures and fiduciary failures of a magnitude that, if the institution’s stated values were binding, would produce a visible record, a debrief, an internal case study, a briefing document for the next generation of executives. No such record exists because the institution does not enforce its own claimed values against its own senior people.
Every reader who has worked inside a great industrial corporation for more than ten years eventually learns this. The discovery is quiet and private. The employee notices that the written values and the operational values do not match. The employee notices that the catastrophic decisions of the past are not on the record the same way the celebrated decisions are. The employee notices that the Hall of Fame is real and the Fame of Shame is absent, and that the absence is structural rather than accidental.
The engineer learning this does not lose respect only for the specific executives involved. The engineer loses respect for the institution’s vocabulary of values itself. The stewardship language is perceived as performative. The fiduciary language is perceived as legal boilerplate. The technical excellence language is perceived as marketing copy. And the engineer, who joined the company because they believed the language, begins to operate as if the language is theater, because that is what the absence of an accountability archive reveals it to be.
This is not a minor consequence. It is how great institutions lose their cultural cohesion from the inside.
The laws we claim to live by lose their credibility when the blatant violators of those laws pay no visible price. The values we claim to build companies around lose their credibility when the blatant violators of those values pay no visible price either.
The Fame of Shame is not, at bottom, an exercise in finger-pointing. It is the minimum institutional record required to maintain the credibility of the institution’s own claimed values.
Without it, every value statement every CEO makes from a podium is contradicted, silently, by the absence of the archive that would prove the statement is meant to be binding.
Why This Matters Now
There are thousands of business leaders right now staring down artificial intelligence and asking two questions at the same time.
How do we fund it. And how do we run from it.
Both questions are being asked inside cloistered rooms. The people in those rooms are senior enough to decide and far enough from the engineering floor that they cannot evaluate the technical evidence directly. They are responsible for the current-year budget and therefore weighing cost in this year’s terms rather than strategic consequence in the next decade’s terms. They are insulated from the customer, whose eventual response will arrive in 2032 or 2036 rather than this quarter. They are reading the technology through management-consultant decks and board-packet summaries rather than through direct contact with the people building the systems.
And they are doing all of this with no archive to consult.
There is no wall in any of those conference rooms displaying the 1976 Kodak meeting. There is no briefing document summarizing the Alto decision. There is no named archetype the executive in the chair can consult before saying we are not in the AI business or let us wait until the technology matures or the ROI case does not support aggressive investment at this time. Every one of those sentences has been spoken before, in a different room, about a different technology, and every one of them produced a company that does not exist anymore.
Nobody in the current room knows that. Because we did not write it down.
The decisions being made this year about artificial intelligence will follow the pattern we have seen every time a disruptive technology has forced a cloistered-room decision. Some organizations will choose correctly, and in fifteen years those choices will be hailed as visionary. The executives who made them will have streets named after them and lobby plaques and Collier Trophies and Hall of Fame inductions. Other organizations will choose incorrectly, and in fifteen years those organizations will be gone. The executives who made the wrong choices will have retired comfortably by then, and their names will not appear in the coverage of the resulting collapse, and the lesson will not be preserved, and the next generation of executives facing the next disruptive technology will walk into a room that has no memory of what happened this year.
This is the asymmetry in one sentence.
Good choices are hailed. Bad choices are forgotten.
That is not balance. That is not accountability. That is a ratchet. It selects, over the long run, for the preservation of success stories and the erasure of failure stories, which means the institutional pool of available lessons is systematically half-complete. The executive walking into the 2026 AI decision has the Neumanns and the Kelly Johnsons and the Steve Jobses available to emulate. They do not have the archetypes of the 1976 Kodak meeting available to recognize. The archive is lopsided, and the lopsided archive is what allows the same meeting to happen, over and over, in different conference rooms and different industries, without anyone in the room knowing that they are repeating it.
How can we learn from the bad choices if we never hear about them and study the why?
We cannot. That is the problem.
The Finger Test, Applied Forward
My own editorial standard when writing this column is what I call the Finger Test. Before I publish, I ask: is the finger pointing at a person, or at a decision? If the finger points at a person, I rewrite. If it points at a decision, I publish.
The Finger Test is not a way of letting anyone off the hook. It is a way of making sure the thing I am preserving is the pattern rather than the grudge. Names wash out of the archive within a generation. Patterns do not. The executives who killed digital imaging at Kodak will be forgotten within another decade. The archetype of the executive who kills a future technology because it threatens the current cash cow will still be recognizable to every engineer reading this column in twenty years, and forty years, and eighty years — provided we take the time, now, to write it down.
The test applies backward to Kodak and Xerox. It applies to the Sonic Cruiser and the MD-12 and the GE36 and the EV1. It applies forward to artificial intelligence, to the energy transition, to every materials revolution and manufacturing method and software platform the current generation of executives is deciding about inside cloistered rooms this year.
Somebody in a conference room right now is making a 2026 AI decision that will determine whether their company exists in 2041.
That decision deserves a name. Not the name of the executive making it. The name of the pattern it fits.
If the pattern is we are protecting this year’s cash flow at the expense of a technology that threatens our core business, it has a name, and that name is Kodak 1976.
If the pattern is we are commercializing this innovation as a constrained high-price product because it does not fit our current business model, it has a name, and that name is Xerox Alto.
If the pattern is we had the hardware, we ran the demonstrator, we proved the economics, and we shelved it because the short-term market signal changed, it has a name, and that name is GE36.
If the pattern is we built the product, leased it to enthusiastic customers, and recalled and crushed the fleet because it threatened an adjacent business, it has a name, and that name is EV1.
If the pattern is we will wait until the technology matures and a competitor proves the market, it has a name, and that name is Fast Follower, and every industrial historian can list the companies that died waiting.
The young engineer sitting in the back of the conference room in 2026 does not have the archive that would let them recognize these patterns in real time. The middle manager briefing the executive does not have it either. The board member voting on the budget does not have it.
That is the work. Build the archive. Preserve the pattern. Teach the next generation to recognize the meeting they are sitting in before the meeting kills the company they work for.
The Two Halves of Memory
The Hall of Fame preserves what we aspire to.
The Fame of Shame preserves what we must not forget.
One without the other is institutional amnesia — and institutional amnesia is the condition under which every catastrophic cloistered-room decision has been made, and will continue to be made, until we build the other half of the archive.
The business press will write the autopsy of the next Kodak within weeks of its bankruptcy filing. The autopsy will explain what happened in the marketplace. It will not explain what happened in the room, fifteen years earlier, where the decision was made. Unless we build the record of what happens in those rooms, we will lose the next Kodak, and the one after that, and the one after that, for exactly the same reason we lost the first one.
We were too polite to point.
And too quick to forget.
— Herbert Roberts, P.E. — Inventor’s Mind