If ever I decide to pen a book about seminal business cases that replicate the failures chronicled in The March of Folly, a popular history book written by Barbara Tuchman in the 1980s, the Lindon-based SCO Group will be the first candidate for inclusion.

The business sections of today’s Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News carried stories about the SCO Group’s decision to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday. The firm became the iconic bete noire of the high-tech world in 2003 when – in a classic David vs. Goliath move – it filed a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM for alleged copyright infringement and for alleged violation of an agreement by putting Unix source code into the code for Linux, a free operating system that competes with Windows. Without getting into all of the messy details, let’s just say that the company’s lawsuit was effectively settled last month when the presiding judge ruled that Novell held the copyrights for Unix. The fat lady, indeed, had sung.

Tuchman’s compelling narrative which sweeps from the Trojan War to the Vietnam War – along with memorable stops in the great medieval ecclesiastical schism that led to the eventual rise of Protestantism and the colonial era when Britain lost the American colonies – speaks of the relentless pursuit of governance through selfish interests. Parallels can certainly be found in the business world. The money quote from Tuchman’s introduction:

“Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defended as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?”

One could write the appropriate variation for The SCO Group. I’ve followed the case from shortly after its initial filing because the company became one of our student agency clients for a semester-long project. At Utah State University, we gave students in their capstone course the opportunity to put their newly acquired public relations skills to the proving ground – work with a client and develop an actionable comprehensive PR campaign. The SCO Group, through the good graces of a colleague’s network contacts, became a client for our students in the midst of the unfolding legal drama. Naturally, our students – while being made generally aware of a 5000-foot vision of the lawsuit – were given the responsibility to develop a thematic campaign for SCO products.

Our students freaked a bit — and rightfully so, in hindsight — at this rather difficult challenge. Nevertheless, I was proud of how the students quickly grasped the dynamics of this company’s product line and the general networked structure of vendors. They embraced the workshop dynamics beautifully – spending lots of time distilling the elements and characteristics that would hopefully communicate forcefully the company’s core competencies. Their final campaign presentation was admirable and I think they knew that the company would receive their recommendations with muted enthusiasm. The good news, however, was that one of the students did find a job with the company shortly after graduation.

Unlike some of our clients in which the results of the students’ work have been realized, the SCO Group experience provided, I believe, an extraordinarily valuable lesson – much as Tuchman did in her masterful account of showing readers the conditional dynamics that led to such spectacular folly. The students noted quite frequently how singularly-minded the company and its CEO were about the impending case. And, students saw the potentially fatal flaw of a small upstart like The SCO Group kicking gigantic IBM in its well-reinforced shins. Students also were a bit concerned about the bravura of CEO Darl McBride, who wore the then-recent Fortune magazine cover of himself as a badge of corporate bravery.

The SCO Group case provided a solid lesson for my students. They learned that public relations is damn difficult, not the warm and fuzzy “I like people” dynamic that often beclouds the PR novice. They also learned that no organization’s public relations efforts or strategy will advance without the CEO taking a proper, visionary role. Risk taking can be visionary but one wonders if SCO ever took a fully-detailed patient history before leap-frogging into the diagnosis.

So acute is the awareness in this Web 2.0 economy that a CEO’s words often signify the essential vision foreshadowing a company’s sense of innovation and excellence as powerfully as one’s actions. “The daily pressures from inside the corporation tend to take up the bulk of the CEO’s time, overwhelming their attention spans,” Rajesh Chandy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, wrote recently in a study that will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing. “But because the CEO sets the tone and culture, not thinking forward and outside of the firm has major negative consequences for innovation.”

Indeed, that apparently was the case for SCO which had placed all of its eggs in one basket. Yesterday’s announcement perhaps had been inevitable for quite some time, merely hastened by recent court rulings.

I doubt few would argue heartily in favor of SCO’s continuing relevance in today’s continuously changing high-tech world. Perhaps, dramatically chastened, it will re-engineer itself accordingly in the face of yesterday’s bankruptcy announcement. The economy, however, will not wait for SCO. The good news in Utah is there already are plenty of fresh high-tech industry players who epitomize the right tech-forward thinking which will catapult the state into an increasingly prominent economic profile.