In retrospectives on corporate failures, not surprisingly, strategic failure typically outranks operational failure as the primary cause -- often by a factor of two to one. Business history is littered with corporate carcasses marking a company's inability to deal with changes in its markets. As enlightening as corporate strategic failures are -- as engineering professor Henry Petroski notes, we learn to succeed by understanding our failures -- corporate strategic successes are also sources of useful lessons learned. Here is a short story of one of them.