Death by a thousand cuts

No one thing is too big to fail. Death by a thousand cuts is a figure of speech that refers to a failure that occurs as a result of many small problems that may not be fatal but the cumulative effect of many of them can cause one to bleed to death. Death by a thousand cuts could refer to collapse of an organization, failure of a plan, product or idea that is destroyed as a result of several small issues rather than one single major one.

An organization can go down easily when they fail to innovate in order to sustain themselves in near future. This can be driven further by the small competitors growing and eating into their market share. The small organizations may have advantage of being lean and can run faster, thanks to agile and lean startups.

Agile allows an organization to adapt to changes easily and in an iterative and incremental steps to a final product. It consists of different methodologies and all of them are based on the concepts of flexibility, transparency, quality, and continuous improvement. An organization can thus out do competitors ('cut them') with small continuous improvements to their product or strategy, and subsequently prevent their early death.