According to Forbes, traditional strategic planning often becomes a ritualistic exercise that fails to generate breakthrough insights, with teams typically reviewing last year’s metrics to create cookie-cutter annual plans that feel stale before implementation. The publication highlights a radical alternative approach called “Killing Your Company,” originally captured in the book Kill The Company, which challenges teams to imagine how competitors with unlimited resources would put them out of business. This method draws on anticipatory innovation principles exemplified by companies like Apple and Netflix, and is supported by Columbia University Business School professor Rita McGrath’s research on preparing for uncertain futures. The exercise aims to create strategic plans based on real-world risks rather than incremental improvements, fostering continuous innovation and resilience in rapidly evolving industries.
Table of Contents
The Psychology Behind Strategic Blind Spots
What makes traditional strategic planning so ineffective often comes down to cognitive biases that the “kill the company” exercise directly confronts. Organizations naturally develop creativity constraints through established processes and success patterns, creating what psychologists call “threat rigidity” – the tendency to become more conservative and stick to known formulas when facing uncertainty. The radical nature of imagining your company’s destruction bypasses these mental blocks by creating psychological safety for uncomfortable conversations. When teams aren’t allowed to defend existing strategies and must instead attack them, they access perspectives that normal planning processes systematically filter out. This approach essentially weaponizes the vulnerability that most organizations try to hide, turning weakness analysis from a defensive exercise into an offensive strategy tool.
Where Companies Get This Wrong
While the concept sounds powerful in theory, I’ve observed several critical implementation failures that undermine its effectiveness. Many organizations treat it as a one-time workshop rather than embedding it into ongoing strategic processes, which defeats the purpose of building continuous innovation mindsets. Others make the mistake of having junior teams conduct the exercise while senior leadership remains insulated from the uncomfortable findings. The most successful implementations I’ve studied involve cross-functional teams with real decision-making authority and follow-through mechanisms that convert identified threats into actionable initiatives. Without these structural supports, the exercise becomes just another theoretical discussion that generates interesting ideas but no real change to business models or resource allocation.
Beyond Tech: Universal Application
While the article mentions tech companies like Apple and Netflix, this methodology has proven equally valuable in traditional industries facing slower but equally devastating disruption. Manufacturing, healthcare, and even professional services firms have used variations of this approach to identify competitive threats they would have otherwise missed through conventional strategic planning. What differs across industries isn’t the value of the exercise but the time horizon for threats – while tech companies might need to anticipate disruption within 2-3 years, industrial companies might be looking at 5-10 year threats that are equally existential. The common thread is that organizations in any sector can become victims of their own success, developing blind spots to emerging business models and technologies that initially seem irrelevant to their core operations.
The Risk of Excessive Self-Criticism
A crucial caveat that often gets overlooked is the danger of swinging too far toward self-criticism. I’ve consulted with companies that became so focused on their vulnerabilities that they lost confidence in their core strengths and differentiators. The most effective implementations balance “kill the company” exercises with equally rigorous analysis of competitive advantages and market opportunities. This creates what I call strategic ambidexterity – the ability to simultaneously defend core business while exploring new growth areas. Without this balance, organizations can become paralyzed by potential threats or, worse, prematurely abandon profitable business lines that still have significant runway. The goal isn’t to create organizational anxiety but to build informed confidence through clear-eyed assessment.
Evolving the Methodology
Looking forward, the most advanced organizations are taking this concept beyond annual planning cycles into real-time threat monitoring systems. They’re creating dedicated teams responsible for continuously updating “company kill scenarios” based on market signals, startup activity, and technological developments. Some are even running simulated competitive attacks using prison break mentality – imagining how competitors could “break out” of conventional industry constraints to create disruptive offerings. The next evolution involves integrating these perspectives into innovation portfolios and M&A strategies, ensuring that companies aren’t just identifying threats but actively building defenses and alternatives. In an era of accelerating change, the companies that regularly practice their own strategic funeral will be the ones that survive to write their actual success stories.
