Some organizations are driven by their continued success to adopt creative processes, which makes them push forward in the competition and thus affect the strategic arrogance that ultimately leads to organizational failure.
Danny Miller has published extensively on this topic starting with his 1990 book, The Icarus paradox: How excellent organizations can bring about their own downfall, which coined the term in the title.
Miller’s 2007 article in the Journal of Management Studies concluded that, following a lengthy interval of success, companies are especially apt to: (1) exhibit inertia in many aspects of structure and strategy-making processes; (2) pursue immoderation by adopting extreme process orientations; (3) manifest inattention by reducing their intelligence gathering and information processing activity; and (4) demonstrate insularity by failing to adapt to changes in the environment.
Success can lead to blindness to the environment. Kodak's example is shocking: a leader in photography for decades, he had digital photo expertise, but he did not want to give up his entire mega-structure of chemical industries linked to conventional photography.
Xerox also shows this arrogance: its research center has created fantastic things, literally donated to Apple and Microsoft. The company is now agonizing.
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