Every December, millions of people revisit the same stop-motion Christmas specials: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Little Drummer Boy, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town and others that feel as much a part of the season as lights and music. Their charm is unmistakable. Their style is instantly recognizable. And remarkably, nearly all of them were created under conditions that would make most modern creative teams freeze.

With December in full swing, we’re entering the busiest shipping season of the year — a time when preparation matters just as much as performance. And few stories illustrate that better than what happened to UPS in 2013. That Christmas, UPS faced one of the biggest logistical failures in its history.

With this week being Black Friday, we’re surrounded once again by bold claims, loud offers and the constant pressure to buy more. It’s the biggest day of the year for retail — the Super Bowl of marketing. But in 2011, Patagonia did something no one expected.

In a world that measures success by speed, scale and constant activity, it’s surprising to see a company rise to the top by doing less, not more. But that’s exactly what happened with Chick-fil-A. For decades, the fast-food industry has chased the same formula: more hours, more locations, more menu items. If you can serve more people more often, you win (or at least that’s what everyone assumed).

Sometimes success can be its own kind of danger. When things are running smoothly, it’s easy to believe that what worked yesterday will keep working tomorrow. That comfort can slowly turn into overconfidence, and before long, the organization that once led the way is the one struggling to catch up. That’s exactly what happened to Blockbuster.

One thing we often see in our industry is what I call boardroom boredom. It happens when things are going well — the work is solid, revenue is healthy and the brand is respected — but those in leadership start feeling restless. They look around, see competitors doing something new and wonder if they should “freshen things up” too.

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, an explosion shook the small Ukrainian city of Pripyat. Inside Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a late-night safety test had gone wrong. A series of design flaws and rushed decisions caused the reactor to overheat and then explode, sending radioactive material miles into the sky.

But the disaster didn’t end with the explosion. In many ways, it began there.

In July 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare. Stretching nearly 6,000 feet across Puget Sound, it was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world — sleek, efficient and by all accounts a triumph of modern design. It was also one of the cheapest bridges of its kind ever built.

In the early 2000s, a small Canadian company called Research in Motion (better known by its product name, BlackBerry) sat at the center of the mobile world. The glowing red light on a BlackBerry meant you were connected to the action. Heads of state carried them. CEOs clipped them to their belts. The physical keyboard felt inevitable, and the company’s mastery of secure email made it the gold standard for mobile communication.