The Hardest Thing in Business

Well, actually there are two things, but they are part and parcel of the same whole. With news today of Sony continuing to struggle and Microsoft's leadership shuffle, along with the Motorola case study from last decade, I am reminded of the difficulty in achieving sustainable business success. Plenty of organizations, nonprofit and for-profit alike, become successful for a time, only to calcify and lose their edge against other, nimbler competitors. This is such a well-trod pathway that sustainable success seems to merit mention as the Hardest Thing in Business.Yet, there is a corollary: the driving force in making sustainable success so difficult is that success itself mitigates against sustainability. Having succeeded, the pervasive executive tendency seems to be to stay the course, rather than to keep innovating--the very factor that made the business successful in the first place. To be fair, there are many forces pushing for what Roger Martin calls "reliability" rather than innovation, but we are struck time after time by heads of schools that became successful by innovating (for example, almost any self-described progressive school) who seem to believe that curating yesterday's success will lead to tomorrow's sustainability. And there is no industry where this is true. None.The best path forward for a successful school (or any organization for that matter) is to keep innovating. It is also the most counter-intuitive and hardest.