What sustains success
Why Great Companies Stop Winning Before Anyone Notices
The thing that kills most successful companies isn't a bad decision — it's a very good one, made one too many times.
The Idea
There's a concept in strategy called the 'success trap,' and it goes like this: the behaviours that make a company exceptional in one era tend to calcify into the behaviours that make it brittle in the next. Not through laziness or arrogance — through something more insidious. Through competence. When a company finds what works, it quite rationally doubles down. It hires people who are good at that thing. It builds processes that optimise for that thing. It measures success in ways that confirm that thing is still working. Slowly, what began as a strategy becomes an identity. And identity is much harder to question than strategy. The researchers James March and Danny Miller both mapped versions of this dynamic across decades of organisational study. March called it the tension between 'exploitation' — getting better at what you already do — and 'exploration' — searching for what you might do instead. Exploitation almost always wins in the short run because it pays off faster. Exploration is expensive, uncertain, and often looks like distraction until it suddenly looks like survival. The uncomfortable implication: the very discipline and focus that investors reward, analysts celebrate, and business schools teach as excellence is often, in slow motion, the mechanism of decline. Sustained success isn't about doing the right thing longer. It's about knowing when the right thing has quietly become the wrong thing.
In the World
Kodak is the famous example, but it's almost too easy — and it obscures a more important detail. Kodak didn't miss digital photography because they failed to see it coming. They invented it. In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera in a lab in Rochester, New York. The prototype was the size of a toaster. The image quality was poor. And when Sasson presented it to management, the response was essentially: interesting, but why would we pursue this? Film was profitable. Film was the business. Film was Kodak. What followed wasn't ignorance — it was rational prioritisation, repeated annually for two decades. Each year, the film business still made money. Each year, digital looked a little more threatening but not yet threatening enough to justify cannibalising what was working. Each year, the decision to stay the course felt reasonable. By the time the threat was undeniable, the internal capacity to respond had atrophied. The people who might have championed a different direction had left or been sidelined. The processes, the incentives, the culture — all of it had been refined to serve a world that was disappearing. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. What makes the story worth sitting with isn't the failure itself — it's that almost every decision along the way was defensible. The trap didn't look like a trap from inside it.
Why It Matters
Most of us will never run a company, but this dynamic plays out at every scale — in careers, in habits, in the way institutions and relationships calcify around what once worked. The person who built a career on a particular skill set and keeps deepening it long past the point of diminishing returns is in a version of the success trap. So is the organisation that keeps optimising its onboarding process when what it actually needs is to rethink what it's onboarding people into. The useful reframe here isn't cynicism about success — it's developing a kind of peripheral vision. Not abandoning what works, but actively maintaining curiosity about what might replace it. The companies and people who sustain success over time tend to share one quality: they treat their current model as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. That's harder than it sounds when the current model is paying the bills, earning the praise, and surrounded by people who've built their expertise around it. But the question 'what would have to be true for this to stop working?' is one of the most valuable questions you can ask regularly — and one of the easiest to keep putting off.
A Question to Ponder
What is something in your own life or work that is successful enough that you've stopped questioning whether it's still the right approach?
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