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Free minibook · PDF, 25 pages
Kodak didn't miss digital photography. An engineer there took a picture without film in 1975, and Kodak later led U.S. digital camera sales. In January 2012 it filed for Chapter 11. The companies in this free minibook aren't the ones that were blindsided. They saw the shift, often years early, and lost anyway.
Get Saw It Coming, Lost the Market free
By Todd Hagopian, who has led business transformations at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works and Whirlpool.
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Who it's for
Leaders of a business that's good at something the market is starting to want less of, or want differently. You've seen the shift, and maybe started a response. The method: audit your response, not your foresight, with seven questions about latency, the customer, the whole offer, constraints, capability, operating model and capital.
Not for you if you haven't yet named a shift, or the business is already in crisis. Then start with The First 90 Days of a Turnaround.
What you'll learn
- Seeing Was Never the Problem
- The Clock Starts When You Notice
- Never Rent the Front Door
- Your Piece Isn't the Product
- Know What Survives, and Let It Run
- Don't Spend the Response on the Past
Plus a final action plan and a worksheet you can use the same week.
Key takeaways
- Seeing is the easy part. The hard part is the gap between the recognition date and the commitment date.
- Run two clocks from your own evidence, starting with yours: months from recognition to commitment.
- Never rent the front door. If you couldn't contact, serve and sell to the customer tomorrow without the partner's consent, the partner owns the relationship.
- Rate each question clear, at risk or unknown. Unknown is a task, not a pass, and an at-risk answer gets acted on, not averaged away.
- The nine historical cases are illustrations, not proofs. The audit's job is to catch avoidable failures while you can still fix them.
From the book
In December 1975, an engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steven Sasson took a picture without film. His toaster-sized prototype captured a black-and-white image and played it back on a television.
Thirty years later, Kodak was the top-selling digital camera brand in the United States.
In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Kodak didn't miss digital photography. It invented it, and for a while it led it. Whatever went wrong, it wasn't that nobody saw it coming.
That's the uncomfortable pattern in this book. The companies here aren't the ones that were blindsided. They're the ones that saw the shift, said so, often in writing, often years early, and lost anyway.
Seeing is the easy part. It doesn't feel easy, because the warning arrives wrapped in noise. The hard part is what happens between that moment and the moment you're committed. That gap is where this book looks.
Todd Hagopian, Saw It Coming, Lost the Market, from the prologue "Thirty-Six Years"
Frequently asked questions
If we already see the shift, what's left to get wrong?
Almost everything. The book's nine cases show seven ways a response can fall short: latency, who owns the customer, the whole offer, constraints that protect the old business, capability, operating model and capital. Each becomes a question you rate clear, at risk or unknown.
Is it so bad to partner our way into a new channel?
Not always. Partnerships buy speed. But ask what the partner gets that you don't: the customer's account, the data, the habit of buying there. The test: in the new model, could you contact, serve and sell to the customer tomorrow without the partner's consent? If not, you're renting the front door.
How slow is too slow?
There's no universal number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Measure two clocks instead, both from your own evidence. Your clock is the months from recognition to commitment; if there's no commitment yet, count to today and write "and counting."
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Go further
Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto is about the bigger fight: the conditions that make companies decay from the inside, the team you need to fight them and the tools to keep a recovered business moving. It's available now. Todd's next book, 10-Minute Transformation, is out February 23, 2027.
The full library
Two ways to get it. Preorder now and it ships on release. Or buy on launch day, February 23, 2027, and get three free audiobooks (10-Minute Transformation, Stagnation Assassin and The Unfair Advantage) plus the full minibook library, on the honor system. Preorders don't include the launch-day bonuses.
About the author
Todd Hagopian, The Stagnation Assassin, is VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. He has led business transformations at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, and Whirlpool Corporation, with $3B+ shareholder value across five turnarounds. He speaks to leadership teams on business transformation, turnarounds, and breaking stagnation.