A company can have a good culture, loyal customers, and still die on schedule.
That’s the Sitting Duck. The organization is not in internal collapse. Trust may be intact. The team may be competent. The problem is simpler and more dangerous: the world is changing quickly, and the company chooses too little change of its own. High environmental melt, near-zero chosen melt.
BlackBerry is the clean example. It wasn’t run by fools. It had serious operators and a real product. But the market moved to touchscreens, apps, and a different model of computing. Internal competence didn’t save it, because it was executing well against a world that was disappearing.
This matters now because AI is widening that gap. You can be doing everything right by the standards of a business model, org chart, or skill stack that is already expiring. The Sitting Duck doesn’t look broken until the market makes the diagnosis for you.