How do smart, experienced leaders make decisions that don’t look so smart in hindsight? They made the investments, they got a lot of exciting feedback from their digital leaders and from the press, they increased the investments, and the cycle repeated.

However, while their companies had plenty of resources, the big digital bets did not pay off quickly enough, or richly enough, to counter the drain they represented on the rest of the business. We think there’s something more here than executive over-exuberance or slowing markets.

This kind of unfortunate decision has happened over and over again, in wave after wave of transformative business technology. It happened with analytics and big data, when companies like Sears and Zynga invested millions in creating analytics units that never paid back their investments. And now it’s happening with digital transformation.