As an advertising professional, you couldn’t miss the launch of the revolutionary new Saturn some twenty years ago.  Never mind that it wasn’t an engineering marvel. It was built by GM, but created in a clean new plant with friendly labor relations, sold by dealers who wouldn’t haggle on price, delivered to customers who were so loyal they would use scarce vacation days to celebrate together at a manufacturing plant.

Today, unless there’s a last-minute Hail Mary from the dealers, Saturn is dead, a toxic brand that’s helping bring down GM.  In an article in Newsweek, Paul Ingrassia explains just what went wrong, and it’s a classic lesson in corporate culture.

First there was infighting--sibling brands fought for resources, and won. Then they lost their champions—both the CEO and the labor leader were replaced by people who quickly reverted to the status quo. Then massive debt and falling sales drove GM to start making Saturns at otherwise idle plants, far from their distinctive culture. R&D was cut—they didn’t have a new model for a decade. In short, everything that made this an innovative approach was scuttled, and the entire auto industry has paid the price. Because instead of learning from Saturn, GM used their powerful internal culture to kill it.

GM execs have long lived in a bubble, getting fresh new cars every few months, driving wide mid-western streets to their spacious suburban homes, flying to meet their peers in corporate jets. So while their market share has been falling for 30 years, they kept reinforcing the old way of doing things, fighting the fuel standards that could have made them competitive, and killing their own innovations in electric vehicles.

Looking to the future of your company, if you want to stay ahead, it’s not enough to come up with a new product now and then.  You have to make sure your corporate culture isn’t killing innovation faster than you can create it.