Ten years ago there were people making millions from owning banks of pay phones in good locations. Not any more. Time marches on and just as some companies innovate themselves into riches, others get innovated out. Sometimes it happens when we least expect it. I offer an example in this excerpt from a book, London Bridges, by Jane Stevenson.

In the book, Hattie and Dil are walking down the south side of the Thames river in discussion.

“It’s one man who did that,” Hattie observed. “He was called Malcolm MacLain, and he killed London River. He wasn’t even thinking about it. MacLain invented a sort of steel box, eight feet by twenty. Shipping containers. They swept the world. You can fill ‘em at source, Dil, and then they stay filled till they get to the buyer. That does in 25,000 dockers’ jobs in London alone. All the people who packed stuff in ships, and all the ones who got it out again. Nothing’s unpacked in transit. Another thing. No one needs warehouses anymore. You can leave shipping containers out in the open. . . . . that kind of change means something. London was here for two thousand years because of the river. Now it’s just here because it’s here. . . . The Thames used to be a world, Dil. Now it’s just an underused amenity.”

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is just as true for businesses as it is for organisms.