October 4, (THEWILL) – Last week, I wrote about the importance of playing the golf course you have rather than the one you expected. Markets move, technology advances and customers develop new habits. Sometimes, despite all the planning and experience we bring to the first tee, we discover that the course is no longer playing the way we prepared for it. I also promised that this week we would look at some organisations that learnt that lesson the expensive way.
For Nigerians of my generation and older, photography once required patience, calculation and, occasionally, heartbreak. I remember my matriculation at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, when a friend and I pooled our money to buy a roll of film. It had thirty-six exposures, so we carefully allocated eighteen pictures each and took turns with the camera, mentally keeping count. Sometimes, when you reached thirty-six, the camera gave you one or two extra clicks, and that always felt like a small bonus.
On this occasion, however, the camera kept clicking. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. By the time we got to forty, our excitement had turned to suspicion. We eventually realised that we had loaded the film incorrectly and that none of the photographs had been taken. Every carefully rationed picture from our matriculation was gone. To this day, I remember how painful that felt. In those days, loading a roll of film into a camera was almost a technical skill in itself.
Afterwards, you took the film to a photo studio and waited to discover whether the important family photograph or graduation picture was actually any good. There was no deleting the unfortunate ones, no taking fifteen versions of the same pose and certainly no checking the back of the camera immediately afterwards. But my lost matriculation photographs are not really the story. Kodak is.
Kodak sat at the centre of that world. Yet in 1975, one of its own engineers, Steven Sasson, built the first digital camera. The technology that would eventually transform photography was therefore developed inside the company itself. Kodak did invest in digital photography, but its extraordinary success had been built around film, processing and printing, and moving decisively away from that world meant challenging the very economics that had made it dominant.
Nigeria lived through that disruption visibly. Digital cameras, camera phones and eventually smartphones steadily removed the need to buy film, process negatives and wait for printed photographs. What had once seemed indispensable became optional. Nigeria also has its own example of how quickly dominance can be eroded when the environment changes.
There was a time when obtaining a NITEL telephone line could feel like an achievement. Then the telecommunications market changed dramatically with the arrival of GSM operators in 2001. NITEL was not entirely excluded from the new technology, but private operators expanded rapidly, consumers embraced mobility and the old fixed-line model lost relevance. After repeated attempts at restructuring and privatisation, NITEL eventually entered liquidation.
Kodak and NITEL are hardly alone. BlackBerry lost its commanding position as touchscreen smartphones redefined the market, Nokia struggled to respond effectively to the new smartphone ecosystem, Yahoo failed to convert its early internet dominance into lasting leadership, and Dunlop Nigeria, once one of the country’s most recognisable manufacturing names, eventually ceased local tyre production amid a combination of changing market conditions, infrastructure challenges and competitive pressures. The broader lesson is that established strength offers no permanent protection when the environment changes faster than the organisation does.
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Kodak and NITEL are very different organisations with different histories, but the thread connecting them is useful. Both occupied powerful positions in worlds that changed around them. Both encountered the technologies reshaping those worlds. Neither converted its inherited strength into comparable strength in what came next. That is where golf becomes interesting.
You can stand on a tee having considered the distance, the wind and the trouble ahead, make what seems like a reasonable swing and still watch the ball disappear into the trees. At that point, there is only where the ball actually lies and what you decide to do next. Golfers, unfortunately, have an impressive capacity to remain emotionally attached to the previous shot. I have forgotten passwords, appointments and occasionally why I walked into a room, yet I can still reconstruct certain bad golf shots from years ago. None of this historical knowledge has ever persuaded a golf ball to move itself back onto the fairway.
What often ruins the hole is not the first mistake but the response to it. From among the trees, the sensible golfer may need to play sideways into the fairway, accept the lost ground and rebuild the hole. But pride sees a narrow opening between two branches and begins an energetic campaign on behalf of the improbable. The longer you stare at the gap, the wider it seems. Then comes the swing, followed by the unmistakable sound of ball meeting tree. The first mistake has now acquired a younger brother.
Life and business work much the same way. We sometimes make the next decision to vindicate the previous one. We keep funding an investment because admitting the original judgement was wrong is uncomfortable, defend strategies whose assumptions have changed, or remain attached to products and ways of working the market has overtaken. The question shifts from What is the best decision from here? to How do I prove that my last decision was right?
The golfer under a tree must confront a simple truth: where the ball lies now matters more than where he intended it to land. That does not mean forgetting the previous shot. Good players learn from it. Was the club wrong? Was the wind misread? Was the shot too ambitious? The previous shot contains information, but there is a difference between learning from the past and remaining trapped inside it.
The same is true after success. A magnificent drive does not guarantee a good approach shot. Yesterday’s birdie offers no exemption from today’s bunker. Companies that dominated their industries for decades receive no immunity from technological change, just as successful careers do not eliminate the need to keep learning. Success and failure share one inconvenient characteristic: neither plays the next shot for you.
However badly the previous one went, the game asks a simple question: what is the best shot available from here? Not the shot you would have preferred, nor the one most likely to restore your pride, but the best decision from the position you now occupy. That is perhaps the deeper lesson from Kodak and NITEL. Adaptation is not simply predicting change, but recognising reality when it arrives and letting go of assumptions that no longer serve you.
Careers take unexpected turns. Investments disappoint. Relationships encounter difficult seasons. Plans fail. Sometimes circumstances change because of our decisions; sometimes the wind simply shifts while the ball is in the air. Either way, sooner or later, we all find our ball somewhere we did not expect. Regret may explain how it got there, but it cannot play the next shot.
So learn what the previous one has to teach you. Own whatever part of it was yours. Then look up, study what is in front of you and choose your club carefully. In golf, as in life, you cannot replay the last shot.
You can only play the next one.
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The author, Meka Niyi Olowola (FSPIN, FIMC), is a seasoned business leader, entrepreneur, and avid golfer.
