“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Marshall McLuhan
Mark Twain is often credited with saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. The difference today is tempo. In earlier eras, organisations could afford years — sometimes decades — to adjust. Now, technological shifts allow far less breathing room. To compound matters, leaders are confronted with more legs of the lion tamer’s chair than ever: AI, geopolitics, transient advantage, and much more besides.
Looking back, the rhyme is easy to hear. Looking forward, the notes are faint, muffled by the noise of the present. McLuhan’s rear-view mirror should remind us how easily we fix our gaze on what has worked before, even as the road ahead is bending or leads off a cliff.
And here lies the paradox. Those best positioned to act on the future are often too busy managing the present to notice it. When they do pause, they tend to define tomorrow using yesterday’s logic. Study the past long enough and the rhymes become clear — but, as the saying goes, it is hard to read the label when you are inside the jar.
The Telecoms of the 1990s: Driving in Fog
In our latest conversation on The Innovation Show with Michael Raynor, he revisited his research on Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) and the upheaval of the 1990s telecoms industry. Back then, the categories were clear with local companies for households, long-distance carriers for cross-border calls, cable for television, mobile as a luxury. Each kept to its lane.
Then fibre optics collapsed the cost of transmission. Wireless became a genuine substitute for fixed lines. Internet Protocol made it possible for cable companies to promise voice calls. The walls were demolished, only regulation remained as a protective mortar holding up distinctions that no longer mattered.
Michael described incumbents as caught between Scylla and Charybdis — technological uncertainty on one side, regulatory inertia on the other. They could sense that convergence was coming, but no one knew when or in what form. Many predicted it would arrive by 2003; in truth, it took far longer. The danger was to overestimate how fast change would bite, and underestimate how deeply it would eventually reshape the landscape.
Those who survived treated their investments as options. This meant investing partial stakes in mobile or satellite TV, which gave them the right, but not the obligation, to scale up as the industry evolved. This way, they could keep the doors open while the fog lifted and they knew what they were dealing with.
The Courage to Exit
“For the corporation to live, it must be willing to see business units die. If the corporation doesn’t kill them off itself, competitors will.” — Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower in Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave (Harvard Business Review, 1995)
That same rhyme reappeared at Verizon under Ivan Seidenberg. The company’s Yellow Pages directories were still printing money, attractive enough to draw private equity bids. But Seidenberg called it a route to “commodity hell.” However comfortable it looked in the rear-view mirror, the windscreen spelled decline.
He chose to shed directories and other stalling units, funnelling capital instead into wireless and fibre. The markets misunderstood and punished him. The stock sagged as billions went into broadband and FiOS (Verizon’s fibre-optic communications service). But by the late 2000s, the verdict shifted. When the fog had cleared, the headlines praised Verizon’s bold bets. While others clung to fading businesses, Verizon had already shifted toward the future.
This is what friend of the show, Rita McGrath calls healthy disengagement — the ability to walk away from yesterday’s fortress before it becomes tomorrow’s prison. And it reflected the principle Raynor distilled in his book (and forthcoming episode) The Three Rules, “Better before cheaper, revenue before cost — and there are no other rules.”
Rita McGrath’s work on inflection points reminds us that seismic shifts rarely arrive as surprises. The signals are always there, but faint, ambiguous, unpalatable and easy to dismiss in the din of day-to-day management. By the time the rear-view mirror confirms them, the chance to act has passed.
This is why Raynor spoke of searching for the signal hidden in the noise. Leaders cannot afford to wait for certainty; they must act while the evidence is still partial, the outlines still blurred.
As our former guest Stan Deetz put it, “Usually people only feel the need for a change when there is a clear and undeniable evidence that survival and people’s chances for success, are at stake.”
The Protagonist’s Trap
To run a business is to be the protagonist of a relentless drama: quarterly numbers, customer demands, shareholder expectations. Few protagonists have the luxury to step outside their own plot and ask whether the story itself has changed.
And when managers do hesitate, they often behave rationally — protecting their own units, responding to incentives. Raynor observed that bottom-up processes alone would have strangled cross-divisional bets, there would be too much protecting one’s turf. It took top-down (leadership) insistence, overriding parochial logic, to give true transformation a chance.
This is why the Droste effect feels so apt as a visual metaphor: the infinite picture-in-picture, each frame containing the last. Without perspective, leaders get trapped repeating the image of yesterday when what is needed is the courage to sketch a new scene.
Today’s Fog
Fast forward to today. Artificial intelligence is rewriting rules across industries, yet no one can say precisely where value will settle. Climate imperatives redraw entire energy and industrial systems, but the timetable is uncertain. Web3 blurs categories of finance, ownership, and identity.
The temptation is always to wait for clarity. But the lesson from history’s rhyme is clear: clarity usually arrives too late. The challenge is not to predict the future with precision — that is impossible. The challenge is to prepare for multiple possible futures, to create space for optionality, and to disengage from what is fading before it is obvious to everyone else.
The conversation with Michael Raynor was a reminder that the dilemmas leaders face today are not new. The faces change, the technologies change, but the rhymes persist. Those who thrived after the telecom upheaval were not clairvoyants. They were simply willing to notice the rhymes early, to create options rather than seek certainties, and to step outside the jar long enough to read the label.
[The second winner of Manu Kapur’s Productive Failure is Yelena C. congrats Yelena]
https://medium.com/media/83fbdc546eacb01dfac0b99668ef0f51/href
Backwards Into The Future: What Leaders Can Learn from Telcos was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.