Picture the meeting. It’s 2004, and some VP at Blockbuster stands up and pitches what sounds like a resignation letter: kill every late fee. The room laughs him out the door. Late fees threw off 250 to 300 million dollars a year, and you don’t set a quarter-billion on fire because a few customers grumble at the counter. But the VP had seen something the rest of them hadn’t. A little mail-order company called Netflix was running a model Blockbuster could never copy. Not for lack of cash or talent. They had plenty of both. Copying Netflix meant torching the one revenue line that paid for the building they were sitting in. Blockbuster wasn’t slow. It was trapped. There’s a name for that trap, and once you learn it, you’ll spot it in many of the giants you’ve watched die.