The Myth of Permanence
Success as a Slow-Acting Poison
Nothing lasts. Not kingdoms, not companies, not golden eras of innovation. But success has a way of making people believe otherwise. It whispers a dangerous lie: We made it. We figured it out. We cracked the code. Just keep doing what we’re doing, and we’ll stay on top.
It’s a lie that has killed more businesses, movements, and leaders than failure ever could. Failure, at least, forces reinvention. Success sedates. It lulls teams into inertia. The product that once electrified the market becomes an expectation. The edge that made you untouchable dulls. You become predictable. Predictability breeds irrelevance.
And then, irrelevance arrives like winter—slow at first, then all at once.
Look at the ghosts of industries past. Blockbuster, a titan with 9,000 stores, laughed off Netflix’s offer to collaborate. Kodak, a pioneer in photography, literally invented the digital camera and then buried it to protect film sales. Nokia, once the king of mobile phones, mocked the iPhone’s lack of buttons. Their common sin? Believing the summit was a place to build, not a place to climb higher from.
But the greater tragedy is not that they failed. It’s that they refused to change while they were winning.
The Fear of Disruption: Cowardice in the Clothes of Stability
There’s another lie that grips organizations in their prime: Change is risky. It isn’t. Not changing is.
But leadership teams don’t frame it that way. Instead, they disguise fear as logic. “We don’t want to alienate our core customers.” “The numbers are strong—why rock the boat?” “Let’s wait and see what the market does before making a move.” What they’re really saying is: We’re afraid to gamble with comfort.
The irony? The most successful companies, the ones that truly last, are led by people who gamble with comfort constantly. Jeff Bezos banned the words, that’s not how we do things here at Amazon. Apple cannibalized its own iPod business with the iPhone because it knew that if it didn’t, someone else would. Tesla didn’t wait for a crisis in the auto industry to disrupt it.
It’s the ones that move when they don’t have to dictate the future. The ones who wait? They spend their final years scrambling to catch up, desperately trying to buy relevance with budgets that no longer impress.
And so we return to you. To your team. To your company. The numbers are good, maybe even great. But the real question is: Are you already dying, just slowly enough not to feel it yet? Is your current strategy akin to “Silently Running a Going Out of Business Sale?”
Stay tuned for Part II of this article appropriately entitled, “Empires Don’t Crumble—They Fossilize First”
