Why Companies Fail Without Being Attacked: Management as the Defense of Boundaries (opens in new tab)

In short: companies usually do not lose a market by being outfought. They lose it by withdrawing attention from a boundary, which is then taken by whatever was already pressing on it. On the attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio, 1997), managerial attention is a scarce resource, and a boundary under external pressure decays at a rate set by that surrounding pressure, not by whether a direct attack ever arrives. There is a pattern that recurs under all the frameworks of management, and it i...