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276 Adaptation

market, and to be too quick to ride an innovation. Carroll and Mui mention
Eastman Kodak’s lack of response to the digital photography revolution as an
example of the former. Xerox’s failure to take charge of the personal computer
revolution is another. But there are as many cases in which a company invested
heavily in an emerging technology that had less commercial potential than
first appeared. Carroll and Mui describe the failure of Iridium, the Motorola
subsidiary that developed and marketed satellite phones for a brief period
before cell phones took over. A very different failure-prone move on their list
is overly aggressive “financial engineering,” a type of error that requires moral
rather than cognitive analysis.
These strategies except the last are legitimate moves that have been carried
out with good effect in many cases. Some applications of these strategies turned
into failures because they were carried out at the wrong time, under the wrong
circumstances. Expansions, continued investment in an established technology
and attempts to ride an emerging technology succeed only when specific condi-
tions are met. Carroll and Mui are quite explicit about those conditions, and the
thrust of their analysis is that companies need to unlearn these types of strategic
errors by adopting stricter conditions for when to apply each business strategy.
Engineering design appears to be a qualitatively different endeavor, but many
design errors can also be analyzed as actions taken when they should not have
been. For example, the Swedish warship Wasa sank in 1628 on its maiden voyage,
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before leaving Stockholm harbor. Nobody hanged for this disaster, because the
fault originated at the top. The Swedish warrior king Gustaf II Adolf had ordered
the ship to support his military adventures on the European continent, and the
king wanted sufficient firepower to protect his supply lines cross the Baltic Sea
and to blockade his enemies. He asked for a second cannon deck, superimposed
on a tried and true design for a warship with a single cannon deck. The taller
hull and the heavy cannons on the upper deck conspired to elevate the center of
gravity and made the ship so unstable that it capsized as soon as the wind hit its
sails. The constraint that was violated is simple to state: Do not raise the center
of gravity on a ship without testing the effect on its seaworthiness. Examples of
constraint violations are equally salient in other fields of activity. World War II is
a rich source of errors committed by military organizations, many of them fail-
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ures to take counterindications into account. These include the inability of the
German high command to consider the possibility that their most secret military
code, Enigma, had been broken, and to stop sending U-boats to their graves in
the North Atlantic. On the other side of the battle, the Allied command launched
the disastrous Operation Market Garden against the German front across the
Netherlands in September of 1944 in spite of intelligence that German forces had