An organization with a product or business model that lets you get recurring revenue inertial runs the risk of the tyranny of cash flow. This tyranny prevents the organization see the strategic need to make changes, difficult decisions or to develop innovative process timing.
Live so many organizations from different sectors, some rooted in strategies based on the protection of cannibalization, historically the record industry, newspapers and publishers now. And other protected on the walls of their business model (model repeatability inert managers). Both, one day, the cannibals are knocking on your door.
It happens that these companies have a dairy cow, which is a name which the boys in the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) used in their strategic matrix to identify products with high profitability and low growth rate, consolidated as a source of recurring revenue (strategic orientation cash flows).
To balance the strategy, the liquidity provided by the “cash cow” should be used to finance innovative processes (more depth to put a bell on the cow), but actually serves to build a wall and lock the cow inside (what Jeff Jarvis in his book “And as you would Google?” lock called the dairy cow at the mine).
Gold jail is a former friend for companies in leadership positions, is the wall that prevents them from having a strategic vision beyond the mere fulfillment of targets (remember the old tell me how you measure me and tell you how I behave), which subjugates managers to the power of the bonus (bonus for achieving results, of course, more short-term vision).
What happened? Those changes had to occur much earlier, but its own executives were blinded by the influx of money that prevented them from seeing a model unsustainable. It is the dairy cow in the coal mine or the tyranny of cash flow.