Mark Twain is credited with the quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I find this quote incredibly relevant as we dive deep into the work of thought leaders who have studied the fate of companies and industries for decades. It is a privilege to explore the research of Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly, Paul Nunes, Clay Christensen, Rita McGrath, and currently, a deep dive into the work of Gary Hamel on The Innovation Show.
While the names of the companies they have studied may change, the problems remain strikingly similar. Leaders who have analyzed case studies of failure and strategic decay often become blind when it is their turn. This is a pathology, a human problem — it is incredibly difficult to read the label when you are inside the jar.
My point with this week’s Thursday Thought goes beyond the idea that history rhymes. When business landscapes shift, it’s not that leaders fail to see it coming — they do. The problem is that they are held hostage by their own success, measured and rewarded on maintaining the status quo. As my friend Gary Hamel says, “Companies miss the future not because it was unpredictable, but because it was unpalatable.”
Top-performing companies recognize the need for new capabilities before their distinctiveness fades — not when business performance starts to plateau. Organizational competencies decline over time, following the same S-curve trajectory as technologies and business advantages. What once made companies dominant eventually becomes their Achilles’ heel.
Today, we see this rhyme playing out in the automotive industry, where German car manufacturers struggle to catch up in software-defined vehicles — just as Nokia failed to adapt to the software revolution in mobile phones.
The Rise of the Software-Defined Car
The curious case of Benjamin Button
For years, the dominance of BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Audi in the global automotive industry seemed unshakable. Their engineering prowess, precision manufacturing, and brand strength made them industry titans. But in the era of electric vehicles (EVs), the competitive landscape has shifted, and the traditional strengths of German automakers are proving insufficient.
Tesla, more than any other company, has redefined the automobile as a software-first product. Step inside a Tesla, and it feels less like a car and more like a smartphone on wheels. The company has built a massive lead in software development, full self-driving capabilities, and over-the-air (OTA) updates. The result is an evolving product, improving after purchase (what Scott Galloway calls a Benjamin Button, it gets better with age) — an entirely new paradigm for car ownership.
BYD, (while heavily subsidized by the Chinese government), is also deeply integrating software into its vehicles. Its vertical integration strategy, spanning battery technology, semiconductor production, and software, ensures tight control over its supply chain and innovation cycles. Meanwhile, legacy automakers, particularly those in Germany, have been slow to shift to software as a core competence rather than a component that can be outsourced.
Volkswagen’s struggles with its in-house software division, Cariad, highlight this challenge. Attempting to build software expertise from scratch has proven difficult, with project delays and costly setbacks. Its very name has become shorthand for the entire industry’s struggles in transitioning to software-centric vehicles. Initially founded to emulate Tesla’s integration of software and hardware, Cariad instead faced delays, layoffs, and reorganizations. The failures have led Volkswagen to seek external partnerships, including a joint venture with Rivian — a move that underscores just how far behind legacy automakers are in software-defined vehicle development.
Historically, automakers viewed software as fragmented, used primarily for engine management, infotainment, or navigation. But as Tesla and others demonstrated, software must now be a fully integrated component, enabling over-the-air updates, advanced battery management, and autonomous driving. Reinventing an industry with a 140-year legacy is no small feat. Reinvention requires not just developing new capabilities but also the courage to jettison a legacy mindset — something that becomes even harder when past success reinforces old ways of thinking.
The industry’s resistance to reinvention has turned automakers into reactive players rather than proactive innovators. If German automakers do not develop these competencies in-house, they risk becoming mere car-body manufacturers for software-first companies, whether they be Tesla, BYD, or even Rivian.
The Nokia Parallel
https://lolnein.com/2016/09/16/smartphonevsnokia/
This struggle rhymes with Nokia’s fate in the early 2000s. At its peak, Nokia mobile controlled over 40% of the global mobile phone market. It was an engineering powerhouse, renowned for its hardware quality, battery life, and manufacturing efficiency. But when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Nokia dismissed it as an overpriced niche product. Internally, many engineers claimed Apple’s touch interface and lack of physical keyboard as a step backward.
However, what Nokia failed to grasp was that the real disruption wasn’t the hardware — it was the software. The iPhone was built around iOS, enabling an app ecosystem that fundamentally changed how people used their phones. Google’s Android soon followed, accelerating the shift toward software-centric mobile experiences. Nokia was slow to move because it had made significant investments in the hardware excellence approach. Nokia had invested heavily in the factories with a deep expertise in hardware, they needed to recoup that investment before really competing on software. As the late Dee Hock said, when is the last time evolution called on the phone and asked, “Are you ready?” or as Gary Hamel puts it, “ The future doesn’t care about your opinions or your feelings”.
By the time Nokia tried to reconfigure, it was too late. Its attempts to pivot — whether through Symbian, Meego, or eventually Microsoft’s Windows Phone — were too slow and insufficiently competitive. The software horse had bolted and by 2013, Nokia exited the smartphone business entirely.
Just like Nokia, German automakers are now facing a transition where hardware excellence is no longer enough. The future of automobiles lies in software, AI, and data integration. The ability to improve performance, add features, and enable full autonomy through software updates is what will define the winners and losers in this industry.
Toyota, however, has taken a different approach. Unlike many legacy automakers, it has not ignored the pivot to electrification. Instead, Toyota has been stealthily building capabilities over decades, recognizing that the transition to EVs is as much about ecosystem readiness as it is about technology. Particularly in Europe and the U.S., where charging infrastructure remains uneven and consumer adoption is gradual, Toyota has opted for a stepping-stone approach — leaning into hybrid technology as an interim solution.
In a way, Toyota is playing ‘second mouse,’ waiting to see whether it will ultimately get the cheese by moving at the right moment.
Toyota: The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese?
The Second Mouse
“The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese” — The Second Mouse (Presumably)
Toyota disrupted dominant American automakers like Ford and GM, not just through its vehicles but through a fundamentally different approach to manufacturing and management. While U.S. automakers dismissed Toyota’s early gains, assuming their success was either exaggerated or unique to Japanese culture, Toyota quietly revolutionized efficiency and quality in car production.
Anecdotes like one shared with me by Gary Hamel on The Innovation Show illustrate how deeply entrenched companies struggle to recognize disruptive shifts. In the late 1990s, as U.S. automakers continued losing market share to Toyota and Honda, one executive admitted to Gary that their company had been conducting benchmarking studies on Toyota for twenty years — yet had made little change. For the first five years, they denied the problem existed. When Toyota’s performance became undeniable, they rationalized it, attributing it to cultural differences rather than replicable processes. Even as Toyota built plants in the U.S. and Europe, achieving the same efficiency and quality with local workers, the American automakers focused on superficial process improvements rather than the deeper management philosophy that empowered Toyota’s workforce to drive continuous innovation.
At the heart of Toyota’s success was a belief in the capabilities of frontline employees. Unlike their American counterparts, who centralized decision-making among supervisors and managers, Toyota gave workers the authority to stop production lines to address defects, trained them in statistical process control, and encouraged continuous improvement — generating millions of small but impactful innovations each year. This distributed decision-making structure allowed Toyota to adapt and evolve far more quickly than its competitors, who were reluctant to challenge their own deeply held management beliefs.
Toyota’s approach to electrification follows a similar pattern. Unlike many legacy automakers, it has not ignored the pivot to EVs, but it has taken a measured approach — gradually building its expertise while assessing market readiness. Toyota’s stepping-stone strategy, prioritizing hybrids while waiting for EV infrastructure and consumer demand to mature, suggests it is once again playing the ‘second mouse’ — observing the landscape before making its decisive move. The question now is whether its calculated patience will pay off in the long run or leave an opening for more aggressive EV-first competitors like Tesla and BYD to dominate the future of mobility. This disciplined approach allowed Toyota to move decisively when it saw the opportunity in hybrid technology.
While most automakers saw hybrids as a niche experiment, Toyota launched the G21 project in the mid-1990s to build a fuel-efficient car for the 21st century. In “Jumping the S Curve”, my friend Paul Nunes shared how the company had been experimenting with hybrid technology for decades, but the challenge was making it viable at scale. Despite major technical hurdles, Toyota’s disciplined execution allowed the Prius to hit the market in 1997 — years ahead of its competitors. Toyota assigned 1,000 engineers to the initiative and committed significant resources to developing a cost-effective hybrid powertrain.
The auto industry is now at a pivotal moment, much like mobile phones were in the late 2000s. The winners will be those who embrace software, rethink their core capabilities, and challenge their legacy assumptions before they become constraints. Toyota’s patient, methodical approach contrasts sharply with Tesla’s breakneck innovation, and history suggests that both strategies have merits. But if legacy automakers, particularly in Germany, don’t recognize the fundamental shift underway, they may find themselves as suppliers in a world where the real value lies not in the car itself, but in the intelligence that powers it. Just as Nokia faded into irrelevance, the next decade will reveal which automakers have the vision — and the humility — to reinvent themselves before it’s too late.
The latest in the series with Gary Hamel
https://medium.com/media/c8235e50146e0e12f4b1af567199b687/href
https://medium.com/media/6d991179c207e15c1ae9ea212c2bbd74/href
The Auto Industry’s Nokia Moment: Will History Rhyme Again? was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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