off-record

Business isn’t some tidy Lego set you can just snap together to build something bigger. No, it’s a living organism—messy, unpredictable, and quick to reject anything that doesn’t belong.

Julius Caesar and Blockbuster, Alexander the Great and Nokia, Napoleon Bonaparte and Kodak—what do they all have in common? They thought they were bulletproof, until they became just another version of Achilles: