These profiles explore what strengthens a business’s ability to keep earning, and what can gradually wear it down.
We use the Meridian framework to connect visible results with the decisions, relationships and organisational conditions behind them. Each profile examines a pattern that helps explain the company’s direction and offers a question you can explore in your own business.
The analysis draws on public sources, including company reports, regulatory findings, research and reporting. Some evidence was available as events unfolded; other material emerged later and helps explain what happened. Looking back can reveal patterns that would have been much harder to establish at the time.
These are independent analyses of public evidence. None of the companies featured is an Adaptiv client, and we have not examined their organisations from within.
Nokia saw the iPhone coming, but couldn’t act on what it knew about itself
On 10 January 2007, the morning after Steve Jobs held up the first iPhone in San Francisco, people inside Nokia met to work out what they had seen.
The slides from that meeting are public now, held in the Nokia Design Archive at Aalto University, which opened to the world in 2025. The executive summary calls the iPhone a serious high-end competitor. Further down, the deck records that the user interface had been a strength for Nokia, that consumer research showed it slipping, and that urgent action was required. Nokia needed to build a touch interface to fight back, it said, and S60 should remain the focus.
Nokia didn’t fail because it couldn’t see what was coming, it saw the fault line the next morning.
Timo Partanen, then Nokia’s director of market and competitor analysis, was in the room. Speaking to IEEE Spectrum in 2026, he described the mood as untroubled. Apple was another competitor with a good product. If it worked, Nokia would do the same.
The numbers agreed with him.
How Toyota turned stopping work into a competitive advantage
Rick Madrid spent seventeen years building Chevrolet trucks at General Motors' plant in Fremont, California. It was among the worst factories in the company. When it closed in 1982 there were more than seven hundred grievances outstanding and absenteeism was running at roughly a quarter of the workforce, according to Paul Adler's study of the plant at the University of Southern California. Madrid drank on shift.
What do these patterns bring to mind in your business?
If one of these stories feels familiar, tell us what you are noticing and what you would like to understand. We’ll arrange a 30-minute conversation to discuss whether an analysis would help.
For analyses commissioned by 31 December 2026, the founding client rate is £900 + VAT. This covers one business or named competitor and one agreed commercial question, including a 90-minute fact-find, research and written analysis, and a 90-minute working session. We agree the scope before you commit.