I used to think culture was the problem. Organizations get stuck because the culture resists change — that’s the conventional diagnosis, and I’ve believed some version of it for years.
What I actually found was more uncomfortable than that.
The people perpetuating the culture genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing. The old guard at Anglo American wasn’t defending a broken system out of laziness or malice. They were doing what every business school, every board, every incentive structure told them to do — protect the margins, serve the best customers, maintain the production quota. That’s good management. That’s the job. The culture wasn’t the problem. The culture was the result of people doing exactly what they’d been rewarded for.
That shifts the diagnosis entirely. It’s not about resistance. It’s about a genuine inability to see.
Here’s what makes that harder to sit with: we only know which strategy was right after the fact. Phil Rosenzweig calls it the Halo Effect — when a company’s adaptive behavior leads to success, we call it agile and visionary. When the exact same behavior leads to failure, we call it reckless and unfocused. Which means the advice to “stay adaptive, question your practices, protect your core” is sound in theory and almost impossible to evaluate in real time.
And yet — the only way to know if a strategy works is to execute it. Mulling over the risk isn’t going to make things clearer. You lose 100% of the time you don’t commit to something you haven’t tried. Carroll didn’t sleep on it. She told them to start bringing people up from the ground.
Good management, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. The practices that made you successful become the reason you fail. Listening closely to your best customers means ignoring everything they’re not saying. Protecting what works locks you into a defensive posture in a world that keeps moving.
The question I can’t resolve — the one I’m still sitting with after all of this — isn’t theoretical. It’s practical. It’s the question anyone trying to help organizations think more clearly eventually faces.
How do you convince a board, a C-suite, a room full of stakeholders who are still profitable and still convinced they’re doing the right thing — to screw the corporate strategy and go back to first principles?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure one exists.