Who Wants to Be the Person Who Drives Your Stock from $160 to $4?

Nobody raises their hand for the job of driving an industry leading company into the ground, yet that's exactly what happened to Xerox leadership in the late 1990s. In 1999, Xerox shares were around $160, by 2001 they were $13, and today they are around $4. That is a 97.5% drop. Do you want to be that person? I doubt it.

But here's the kicker – Xerox leadership had available to them every piece of information they needed to avoid that catastrophe. They just never asked the right questions to get it.

This isn't another story about corporate incompetence or technological disruption. This is about something far more fundamental: how intelligent, successful executives can sit on game-changing information and completely miss it because they're not having the right conversations with their own people.

By the way…that is what I help you with so you don’t become that guy.

The $5 Billion Question Nobody Asked

In the late 1990s, Wall Street was throwing money at anything with a ".com" in its name. Xerox stock soared to over $160 per share in May 1999, making investors rich on paper as they bet on the company's technological innovations. But while the market was essentially screaming "You're sitting on the future of computing!", Xerox executives were asking a completely different question: "How do we sell more copiers?"

Three thousand miles away from corporate headquarters in Rochester, New York, researchers at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) had developed what would become the foundation of modern computing: the graphical user interface, the computer mouse, laser printing, Ethernet networking, and the desktop metaphor we all use today. These weren't random experiments – the PARC team understood exactly what they were building and its revolutionary potential.

But somehow, that understanding never made it from Palo Alto to Rochester.

The Communication Chasm

The problem wasn't secrecy. PARC researchers published widely, gave thousands of demonstrations, and distributed over a thousand Alto computers throughout the 1970s. The problem was that Xerox executives weren't asking the questions that would help them understand what they had.

Consider what PARC researcher John Warnock (who later founded Adobe) observed: "There was a tremendous mismatch between management and what the researchers were doing. These guys had never fantasized about what the future of the office was going to be. When it was presented to them they had no mechanisms for turning those ideas into real live products. You were talking to people who didn't understand the vision."

This wasn't a failure of presentation – it was a failure of inquiry. The executives weren't asking:

• "Help me understand how this changes how people work"

• "Walk me through a day in the life of someone using this technology"

• "What are the second and third-order effects of this innovation?"

• "What industries could this disrupt that we're not even thinking about?"

Instead, they were asking technical questions that couldn't bridge the gap between innovation and business impact, or worse, filtering everything through "How does this help us sell more copiers?"

The Geographic Bias That Cost Billions

The 3,000-mile distance between PARC and headquarters wasn't just physical – it created cognitive distance. The executives weren't asking "What don't we understand about what's happening 3,000 miles away?" They were asking "Why should we care about what those guys in California are doing?"

This draws me back to FBI’s “Phoenix Memo” prior to 9/11. An agent in Phoenix had noted that a lot of undocumented Muslim guys were taking flight lessons and not bothering to learn how to land the planes and sent it to FBI HQ. It was shunted aside because “what do those guys in Phoenix really know about terrorism?”

As one head of Xerox's research facility put it: "The computer will never be as important to society as the copier." When your mental framework is "we're a copier company," you literally can't process information about revolutionary computing interfaces, no matter how clearly it's presented. And when some guy in Phoenix lays out for you a coming attack and your attitude is “we’re FBI HQ, we’ve got this”, things don’t go well.

Having spent 22 years in federal law enforcement, I've seen this pattern repeatedly – critical intelligence gets dismissed not because it's wrong, but because of where it's coming from. Usually I was in some far flung location, reporting what was happening, and FBI HQ pushed back because “what does he know about what is happening where he is?”

When the Market Knows What Management Doesn't

Here's where it gets truly painful for any executive: While Xerox leadership was dismissing the commercial potential of PARC's innovations, Wall Street was betting billions on exactly those innovations. The late 1990s stock spike wasn't just dot-com hysteria – investors were specifically valuing Xerox for its technology portfolio.

But Xerox executives never asked the obvious question: "What does the market see that we're not seeing?" Instead, they likely dismissed the stock spike as speculation rather than recognizing it as external validation that they were sitting on transformative technology.

The market was essentially providing free consulting – screaming that PARC's work had massive commercial potential. But because this feedback came from "speculators" rather than "real customers," it was ignored.

The Questions That Could Have Changed Everything

Meanwhile, competitors were asking better questions. When Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979, he didn't ask technical questions about the Alto computer. He asked strategic ones: "What would this mean for personal computing?" "How would this change how people interact with computers?" "What becomes possible that wasn't possible before?"

Those questions led to conversations that revealed the true value of what PARC had created. Jobs walked away with insights that became the foundation for Apple's revolution in personal computing, while Xerox executives continued to view PARC's work as interesting but irrelevant to their core business.

And at least 16 PARC researchers left to join Apple after Jobs visit…because he was asking the right questions.

The Everyone-Knows-Something Principle

This brings us to a fundamental truth about organizational intelligence: Everyone in your company knows something that you do not know. The question is whether you're asking the right questions, in the right way, to access that knowledge.

During my career as an FBI agent, I learned that the most valuable intelligence often comes from the most unexpected sources - the patrol officer, the junior analyst, the field agent in some remote office, or the witness in one case who provides crucial information on another case. The same principle applies in corporate America.

The PARC researchers weren't hiding their insights. They understood the revolutionary potential of what they were building and were eager to share it. But they needed executives who would ask questions that helped them translate technical innovation into business impact:

• "What problems does this solve that we didn't even know were problems?"

• "What new possibilities does this create?"

• "How might this change entire industries?"

• "What would have to be true for this to transform how people work?"

The $156 Per Share Lesson

By 2002, Xerox stock had fallen to around $4 per share and has hung there ever since. At one point they controlled 100% of the copier market and now they are somewhere around 3%.  But they should be dominating the world of copiers and computing. But no one had the necessary conversations and there they are.

The company that invented the future of computing had missed its own revolution entirely. Steve Jobs later said, "Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties."

But this isn't really a story about Xerox or PARC. It's about the conversations that never happened and the questions that were never asked. It's about how brilliant people can sit on game-changing information and completely miss it because they're approaching conversations with the wrong framework.

The Questions Your Organization Needs You to Ask

Every organization has its own version of PARC – pockets of knowledge and insight that could transform the business if properly understood and leveraged. The question is whether leadership is asking the right questions to access that knowledge.

Instead of asking "How does this help our current business?" try asking:

• "What does this make possible that wasn't possible before?"

• "What are you seeing that we're not seeing?"

• "Help me understand the broader implications of what you're working on"

• "What would have to change for this to become transformative?"

• "What questions should I be asking that I'm not asking?"

The information your organization needs to thrive is already there. Your people have insights, observations, and understanding that could change everything. The only question is whether you're having the conversations that will help you access it.

Because somewhere in your organization, someone knows something that could be worth $156 per share in value. The question is: Are you asking the right questions to find out what that is?

I've spent decades developing protocols to extract critical information from people who have every reason not to share it. But the hardest cases aren't hostile interrogations - they're conversations with your own people who have vital information but don't know how to communicate its importance, or leadership that doesn't know how to ask the questions that will unlock it.

Don't be the executive who drives your stock from $160 to $4. Be the one who asks the questions that unlock the insights your organization is sitting on and makes you the next Microsoft.