December 7, 2025
For decades, “best practice” has been treated as a managerial North Star—codified wisdom, reliable playbooks, and the routines that help companies scale. Yet history keeps delivering the same warning: best practices eventually stop being best. Markets shift, technology leaps forward, customer expectations evolve, and the strategies that once guaranteed survival quietly become sources of vulnerability.
This is the central insight of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, the book that influenced leaders from Steve Jobs to Thomas Watson at IBM. Christensen argued that companies rarely fail because of incompetence. They fail because they manage too well—optimizing the existing business so effectively that they lose the capacity to build what comes next.
In other words, they become trapped by their own best practices.
Established companies usually have powerful advantages: resources, brand equity, loyal customers, strong distribution, and proven processes. But these strengths have a hidden cost. They anchor decision-making to what has historically worked, not to what will work tomorrow.
Blockbuster optimized the rental model as streaming emerged.
Kodak invented the digital camera but buried it to protect its film business.
Nokia saw the iPhone coming but underestimated its impact.
These companies didn’t lack intelligence. They lacked internal systems that allowed them to challenge their own logic.
Few leaders today embody Christensen’s warning—and the antidote—as clearly as Steven Bartlett. His company is growing at an extraordinary rate, yet he has deliberately created an internal team with one goal: make the company obsolete before someone else does.
This initiative, known as FlightX, embodies a modern response to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Bartlett gives the team its own budget, its own approval processes, and direct access to him as CEO. Their mandate is simple and radical:
• Build products that could replace the current business.
• Explore technologies that undermine existing revenue streams.
• Challenge the assumptions that today’s success depends on.
The team is already prototyping AI-driven podcasts that could replace The Diary of a CEO, new digital production tools that eliminate the need for physical sets, and alternative podcast advertising systems that disrupt the existing market model.
Bartlett frames it this way: companies don’t die because they fail to see disruption coming. They die because they see it—and still fail to act. Internal cannibalization becomes a strategic discipline, not a threat.
This approach is not new, but it’s rare to see it executed so explicitly today. It echoes Thomas Watson’s “Wild Ducks” team at IBM, a small group of independent thinkers given permission to break rules, bypass bureaucracy, and challenge the core business for nearly fifty years. These teams exist for a reason: once a company becomes “tame,” it loses its instinct for invention.
As technology cycles accelerate—especially with AI—best practices age faster than ever. Many of today’s safest playbooks may be tomorrow’s strategic liabilities. Companies that treat best practices as permanent truths risk drifting dangerously out of sync with market reality.
Survival now requires:
• questioning whether existing processes still match the environment
• creating structures that reward exploration, not just refinement
• challenging internal assumptions before competitors do it for you
• empowering teams to test disruptive ideas without bureaucratic friction
Innovation isn’t an accessory—it’s becoming a structural requirement.
In an environment where best practices expire faster than ever, leaders need clarity more than certainty. That’s where BrandScout.io becomes valuable. It’s a strategic intelligence platform built for leaders navigating dense, shifting markets—where competitors move quickly, new categories emerge overnight, and assumptions can become outdated without anyone noticing.
Brandscout provides a Competitor Intelligence Database (CID) that helps companies keep a living, evolving view of their competitive landscape.
When things begin to move in the wrong direction—market position weakening, competitors accelerating, messaging becoming misaligned—Brandscout gives you the tools to diagnose the issue and take corrective action. It becomes the strategic command center that turns raw change into informed decision-making.
A modern best practice is not a fixed method. It’s a willingness to update the method.
Organizations that survive the next era of disruption won’t be the ones who hold most tightly to what made them successful. They will be the ones who create systems—like FlightX, Wild Ducks, and other strategic skunkworks—that continually test whether success is becoming a trap.
Christensen’s message remains razor-sharp: the forces that make a company dominant are often the same forces that make it vulnerable.
The leaders who understand this are already rewriting their playbooks.