Hey everyone,
Success has a half-life. Every accomplishment contains the seeds of its own irrelevance.
The playbook that won you the market becomes the playbook you can't put down. The systems that made you successful become the systems you are most reluctant to question.
Most leaders don't lose because they make bad decisions.
They lose because they become exceptional operators of a business that no longer exists.
That’s worth a re-read. You lose because you're really, really good at something people no longer need.
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What I’m Seeing
I see this pattern across industries right now.
TV newsrooms optimized for broadcast... while their audiences live on every screen.
University athletic departments organized around yesterday's business models... while their athletes have become creators, founders, and distribution channels.
Publishers creating more and more content... when the durable asset is actually the community.
None of these organizations are failing at what they do. They're excelling at it. The operations are tight. The expertise is deep. They’ve reaped the rewards of doing things efficiently over time.
The business just... moved.
And the data says it's moving faster than ever. In 1965, the average company spent 33 years on the S&P 500. By 1990, it was 20. By this year, the forecast is 14.
Fourteen years. That's barely the length of an average mortgage.
One more number to layer on to that story: of the 1,600+ companies that have appeared on the S&P 500 over the past half century, only 64 stayed on the list the entire time.
Sixty-four.
Think Like a Media CEO
So what do the 64 have that the 1,500+ didn't?
For all of my years at Disney and Paramount, I was responsible for maintaining and optimizing the traditional business... while building the business of tomorrow. At the same time.
And here's the thing: the traditional business wasn't the obstacle. It was the engine. The cash it was throwing off enabled the investment... in the case of television, in streaming and short form.
At Disney, we built our social and short form video offerings by leveraging our tv-first newsrooms. At CBS, we built our 24/7 FAST streaming businesses by bringing together local and national reporters who had largely been filing for tv shows.
That's transformation. That's building planes while in flight.
The talent didn't change. The purpose didn't change. What changed was everything around them... the formats, the platforms, the business models. Which brings me to what I learned in those rooms:
→ The instinct of every successful organization is to protect. But many leaders confuse protecting with preserving.
Preserving is about keeping things as they are.
Protecting is about keeping things alive.
Your job is not to protect the institution. It's to protect its purpose.
Purpose should be the one permanent thing. Everything else... the formats, the org chart, the revenue model, the distribution deals... is negotiable.
The 64 companies that survived didn't preserve their business models. Coca-Cola isn't a soda fountain syrup company. 3M isn't a mining company... it's in the name and they left it behind anyway. They held the purpose and renegotiated everything around it.