As Stanford Graduate School of Business strategy professor Robert Burgelman once observed to a classroom full of students in 1982 (of which I was one), the greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place. Burgelman’s insight kept pinging in my brain throughout my twenty-five years of research into the question of what makes great companies tick, especially in explaining why some companies fall from grace. When you deeply understand the underlying causal factors that give your flywheel
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