Those that want to survive in the never-ending oil boom/bust cycle will approach it differently.
And each bust cycle brings to light those that did and did not.
This isn’t new to us that have rode this roller-coaster for decades.
It is new, to some investors that wanted to jump on the ride long after the climb up had started.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
1905-06
Change is continuous, companies who cannot change die. I worked for ten years for a company whose products were so successful that there was almost no such thing as an organization of any kind operating without using something they made. No one except us old timers knows anything about it now. In ‘72 when I started their products were in almost every store, every office, every printing business, every church, the list goes on and on but now they are a memory. At some point they realized that they needed a whole new business model and they had what was for the time a huge cash reserve but it was squandered on bad decisions that did not pan out. When I was hired they were just giving up on one new product that was in theory a good idea for the time but could not be made to operate for even eight full hours without problems. After a few months with the company I was shaking my head every time I thought about it, any of their experienced tech reps could have told them from the start that there was no way it would ever work reliably but somehow their product development people thought they knew better. I left ten years later as they were in the process of breaking the company into divisions and selling them off to try to salvage some core line that would be profitable. They wanted me to move hundreds of miles to a new territory with no guarantee that I would have a job six months later. I went into competition with them and had a very good business for almost twenty years doing maintenance on their old products that were still in use.