Usually, when a synergy strategy falls flat, the people who put it together are pushed out and replaced by a team that unwinds the strategy, while deriding their predecessors as fools. Well, in the case of Internet conglomerate IAC, CEO Barry Diller has so much control that he didn’t just engineer the flawed strategy, which covered a wide range of businesses from financial services to dating services. Diller also is sticking around for the unwinding of that strategy. He recently held a pretty thoughtful interview with the Wall Street Journal, explaining how he got things wrong.

Diller says he realized IAC was “overly complex and unmanageable.” (That shows up in our research as one of the most commonly overlooked problems. The complications that come with scale can, by the way, be foreseen and assessed before a strategy to achieve scale is pursued.) He adds that “every mistake we’ve made in acquisitions has been outside our essential spheres of expertise”–underscoring the difficulties that we found when companies thought they were moving into an adjacent market, only to find that the new market is too different from the existing market where they operate.

Diller is now so relentless about the need for focus he even suggests that Disney sell its mega-success, ESPN. For the full interview, follow this link.

It’s important, however, not to let Diller off the hook completely.  He is, essentially, saying that he made some mistakes, but that he has it right now.  Some important questions are left unanswered:  But, why did you make those mistakes?  How can you be sure that you aren’t making them again?  Even if you’re doing something different, what makes you think that you’re right this time?