Growth doesn’t always die because of competition. More often, it’s murdered in the boardroom — death by comfort. Promoters and senior leaders, drunk on past glory, start treating their old playbook like it’s the Bhagavad Gita of business. Every page is sacred. Every tactic is eternal. And heaven forbid a young manager suggests a new move — because in the land of comfort, heresy wears the badge of “disruption.”
As Peter Drucker once said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.” Yet that’s exactly what most leaders do.
Comfort is the Silent Killer
Comfort zones masquerade as wisdom.
Leaders believe, “If it worked for 20 years, why change it?”
But markets evolve faster than egos.
Remember HMT watches? Revered once, irrelevant now. They kept ticking the same way while Titan reinvented time. Even Nokia — they thought “hardware is king” until smartphones redefined the throne.
When comfort becomes culture, companies confuse stability with stagnation.
They don’t notice the ground shifting until the rug is pulled.
How to Break the Comfort Curse
Here’s the not-so-secret recipe to escape strategic sleepwalking:
Create a Disruptor Squad:
A separate team of rebels, thinkers, and tinkerers. Their job? Question the holy book. Tear pages. Write new ones.
Monthly Idea Jams:
Schedule meetings where only new ideas are allowed.
No “we tried this before” excuses. No eye-rolls from the veterans.
Ring-Fenced Budgets:
If ideas are starved of oxygen (read: money), they die gasping.
Allocate funds purely for experimentation.
Controlled Disruption:
Don’t burn the house to test the fire alarm.
Let new initiatives run in sandboxes so the core business stays safe.
Empower & Protect:
Rebels need air cover. Shield them from the “this won’t work” brigade.
Think of it as having two engines: one keeps the plane flying, the other experiments with rocket fuel.
Reinvent or Fade Away
If you’re not growing faster than your industry average, you’re not stable — you’re sliding.
In today’s world, irrelevance arrives disguised as respectability.
Jack Welch once said, “When the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
The moral? Don’t wait for the obituary.
So, dear promoters and leaders:
Love your playbook, but don’t marry it.
Frame it on the wall if you must, but don’t force the next generation to chant it like a hymn.
The past brought you here.
The future demands reinvention.
Because comfort zones are not cushions. They’re quicksand. And the only way out is to keep moving.