Further Reading: The Einstellung Effect at Institutional Scale

Essential

Christensen, C. M. (1997). The Innovator's Dilemma. Harvard Business Review Press. The definitive business-level treatment of how successful companies are disrupted by inferior technologies from below. Christensen's framework maps directly onto the Einstellung effect at organizational scale. (Tier 1)

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Kuhn's concept of "normal science" (productive work within a paradigm) and "paradigm crisis" (when anomalies overwhelm the paradigm) is the scientific-level parallel to the Einstellung effect. (Tier 1)

The Kodak Case

Research on Kodak's failure has been published in multiple business school case studies. Lucas and Goh (2009), "Disruptive Technology: How Kodak Missed the Digital Photography Revolution," provides a detailed strategic analysis. (Tier 2)

Military Einstellung

McMaster, H. R. (1997). Dereliction of Duty. HarperCollins. Documents how the military's conventional warfare expertise blinded it to the insurgency nature of the Vietnam conflict. (Tier 1)

Nagl, J. A. (2005). Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. University of Chicago Press. Analyzes counterinsurgency adaptation (and failure to adapt) across conflicts. Directly relevant to the "fighting the last war" pattern. (Tier 1)

Exploitation vs. Exploration

March, J. G. (1991). "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning." Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. The foundational paper on the exploitation-exploration trade-off. March shows that organizations that only exploit eventually become obsolete, while those that only explore never develop competence. (Tier 1)

Research on the Einstellung effect in expert cognition includes Bilalić, McLeod, and Gobet (2008), "Why good thoughts block better ones," demonstrating the effect in expert chess players. (Tier 2)

For Instructors

The Kodak timeline (1975-2012) makes an excellent classroom exercise. Present the timeline in two stages: first, ask students to evaluate Kodak's decisions given the information available at each point. Most will find the decisions reasonable. Then reveal the outcome and ask: at what point should Kodak have acted differently? The gap between "reasonable in context" and "catastrophic in hindsight" demonstrates the Einstellung effect viscerally.