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Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 77
girl, perhaps a student there, is famed for writing: “Good-bye, God. I am
going to Bodie.”), gives you an eerie feeling of times gone by. But you can
also sense that those days were vivid, full of life (lots of whiskey drink-
ing and shooting evidently included) and gold mining, of course.
Bodie is a great analogy for many corporations—the state of its
maintenance is called “arrested decay.” The California parks depart-
ment does not seek to repair Bodie but simply tries to slow down its
eventual demise—supporting a house wall with a log to keep it from
falling or closing a door blown open in the wind to protect the insides
(see photo). Perhaps arrested decay is what many once successful com-
panies find themselves in—hoping to prolong the worn-out glory for
visitors to witness as long as possible.
Photograph by Jaak Treiman (August 2009)
