When Alexander Graham Bell offered the telephone patents to Western Union, they turned him down, because they had a perfect strategy—running a consistent telegraph business was their mission. They’d still be doing it today if the change agent hadn’t arrived and rewritten the rules of the game. Years later, when AT&T failed to capitalize on all the innovations in telecom, from fax machines to the nascent internet, they repeated the very same mistake that Western Union made—the mistake that enabled them to exist in the first place.
