You’ve heard it in every boardroom. "We need to innovate." It's a mantra, almost a religious chant at this point. But here’s the thing: most companies are terrified to actually kill the old way of doing things. They want the new results without the messy, painful funeral for the processes that made them successful in the first place. It’s a paradox. You can’t plant a new forest while you’re still clinging to the dead trees because they’re "sentimental" or "safe."
Innovation isn't just about adding new stuff. It’s mostly about subtraction.
The Cognitive Trap of "But It Still Works"
Psychologically, we are wired for loss aversion. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate who basically wrote the book on how we make bad decisions (Thinking, Fast and Slow), proved that the pain of losing something is twice as powerful as the joy of gaining something. This is exactly why leaders struggle to kill the old way. That legacy software? It’s clunky, sure. It crashes once a week. But "we know how to fix it." The new system? That’s an unknown. It’s scary.
I’ve seen it happen in massive manufacturing firms. They’ll spend $50 million on a digital transformation and then keep the old paper-based reporting system "just in case."
What happens? The staff ignores the new tech. They default to the paper. The $50 million investment becomes a very expensive paperweight. You have to burn the boats. If you don't remove the option to go back, people will always go back.
Kodak, Nokia, and the Ghost of Success
We love to talk about Kodak. It’s the classic "they missed the digital wave" story. But that’s actually factually incorrect. Kodak didn’t miss digital; they invented the first digital camera in 1975. Steve Sasson, the engineer who built it, was told to keep it quiet because it threatened the film business. They refused to kill the old way—the high-margin, cozy world of chemical film—to embrace a future they already owned.
Nokia did the same thing with Symbian. They had a dominant market share. They saw the iPhone coming. They had touchscreens in the lab years before Steve Jobs took the stage in 2007. But their internal culture was so tied to the "old way" of hardware-first design that they couldn't pivot to a software-first ecosystem.
Success is a terrible teacher. It makes you think you’re invincible. It makes you think the rules don't apply to you anymore.
Why Middle Management is the "Innovation Graveyard"
Middle managers aren't villains. They’re just people with KPIs.
If you tell a manager they need to be "innovative" but then punish them if their quarterly numbers dip by 2%, they will never, ever kill the old way. Why would they? The old way is how they get their bonus. The new way is a risk to their mortgage.
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To change a culture, you have to change the incentives. Adobe did this brilliantly when they moved to the Creative Cloud. They killed their boxed software—their primary revenue driver—overnight. It was a bloodbath for a few quarters. Wall Street hated it. But they stuck to it. They forced themselves to live in the future, and now their valuation is astronomical compared to the "buy a CD once" era.
How to Actually Kill the Old Way Without Breaking Everything
It’s not about being reckless. It’s about being decisive.
First, you need an "Audit of Obsolescence." Stop asking what you should start doing. Start asking what you should stop doing. Honestly, look at your weekly meetings. If you have a meeting to discuss the notes of another meeting, that’s a legacy habit that needs to die.
Second, create a "Safe to Fail" zone. You can't ask an entire 5,000-person organization to change on a Monday. Pick a small team. Give them a different set of rules. Let them kill the old way in a vacuum. If they succeed, you scale. If they fail, the ship doesn't sink.
Third, change the language. Stop calling it "Legacy." Call it "Technical Debt." Legacy sounds prestigious, like an inheritance. Debt sounds like something you need to pay off as fast as possible.
The Netflix Transition: A Masterclass in Cannibalization
Reed Hastings is a bit of a legend for this. When Netflix was a DVD-by-mail company, it was printing money. But Hastings saw the bandwidth speeds increasing. He knew streaming was the future. He didn't just add a streaming tab; he eventually split the company (remember the Qwikster debacle?) and prioritized the streaming side even though it was objectively worse than the DVD service at the time.
He was willing to cannibalize his own successful business to ensure he wasn't cannibalized by someone else. That is the essence of the "Kill the Old Way" mindset. If you aren't willing to disrupt yourself, I promise you, a startup in a garage in Palo Alto or Bangalore is already doing it for you.
The Human Cost of Staying Put
Let's get real for a second.
Sticking to the old way doesn't just hurt profits; it kills morale. High performers hate inefficiency. They hate "doing things because that’s how we’ve always done them." When you refuse to modernize, your best people leave for companies that will let them use their brains instead of just following a 20-year-old manual.
You’re left with the "B players" who are happy to hide in the bureaucracy.
Actionable Steps for Tomorrow Morning
If you're ready to actually move the needle, you don't need a consultant. You need some guts.
- Identify your "Zombie Projects." These are things that aren't quite dead but aren't growing. They suck up resources and headspace. Pick one and kill it by Friday.
- The "Clean Sheet" Exercise. Ask your team: "If we started this company today with $10 million and no existing equipment or software, would we do it the way we're doing it now?" If the answer is no, you have a roadmap for what needs to change.
- Stop the Parallel Run. If you’ve implemented new tech, set a hard "sunset date" for the old one. No extensions. No exceptions.
- Reward the "Killed" Ideas. Literally. Give a bonus to the person who proves a certain process is useless and gets it removed. Celebrate the deletion.
It’s gonna feel weird. It might even hurt a bit. But the "old way" is a tether, not a foundation. Cut it.