On 2018-11-21, Wale Akinyemi argued that some of the world’s best-known companies do not collapse because they stop working, but because their leaders assume the future will behave like the past.
In his analysis, the real danger is what he calls a straight-line assumption: the belief that strong products, aggressive marketing, and past dominance will automatically guarantee continued survival. He says that mindset often grows inside leadership teams that become comfortable with success and stop treating relevance as something that must be defended.
Akinyemi uses the cable television business as one example. Traditional subscription platforms, he notes, have long relied on sports, movies, and popular shows to keep customers paying premium prices. That model looked secure until Netflix emerged and began investing more than $3 billion every year in content while offering direct-to-consumer access at lower cost.
He says the same pattern appears in sports and entertainment. League of Legends, a video game with an e-sports competition, attracted more than 360 million viewers worldwide last year. By comparison, the Super Bowl drew about 111.3 million viewers, while the NBA finals pulled in just 30 million viewers.
For Akinyemi, those numbers show how quickly audience habits can change when companies or industries assume their current advantage will last forever. He says success itself can become a threat when leaders begin to see it as a destination rather than a stage on the way to something else.
He describes such executives as fixed-destination thinkers, saying they focus on protecting what they already have instead of preparing for disruption. In his view, that is why no one who treats success as a final stop can become a true disruptor.
To support that point, he points to Intel under Andy Grove, when the company became the world’s number one maker of computer chips. Grove’s book, Only the Paranoid Survive, is presented as a warning that continued relevance requires vigilance, not comfort.
Akinyemi also invokes the Titanic as a historical example of what happens when confidence replaces caution. He says the same kind of thinking still sinks corporate giants today, because leaders who lose hunger and healthy paranoia often fail to notice the iceberg until it is too late.
Wale Akinyemi is the chief transformation officer at PowerTalks.
