If you've been following me for a while, you know my business is changing. Some of those changes are visible already while some are still "coming soon!"
This shift feels somehow "bigger" and "more important" than everything that's come before it. But I also know that this is just a continuation of the most important work I've been doing for more than 30 years. And there's one question I've been wrestling with all year that's the foundation of everything this transition represents:
What kind of organization am I actually trying to create?
This isn't a tiny question. All kinds of decisions are tied up in that one question. It's the lever for nearly everything else.
When I work with clients on their business models, I always begin with understanding who they are and what really matters to them. This is more than a values test, but values are an important part of that equation. Who you are - as a person or an organization - is fundamental to every decision that flows out from there.
That's why this isn't simply a question of what I want to sell next or what makes the most money. Those things matter. I have bills to pay. Revenue matters. Survival matters.
But survival isn't the same thing as preservation.
I could keep a business alive by turning it into something I don't particularly want to run. I could keep doing work because people know me for it, preserve an old business model because it still generates revenue, or optimize for what sells most easily instead of what I believe is most important.
The business might survive, but would I? Would I have preserved what I was actually trying to build?
Kongō Gumi is a Japanese company that traces its history all the way back to 578 AD. For more than 1,400 years, its identity has been tied to building and restoring Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and other culturally important structures.
Fourteen hundred years. You don't survive that long without being adaptable.
During World War II, when temple construction wasn't high on the to-do list, Kongō Gumi used its woodworking capabilities to build coffins. Temples to coffins is one hell of a pivot, but it worked to help the company survive! It adapted its existing capabilities to survive the external conditions it couldn't control.
In 2006, financial problems became severe enough that Kongō Gumi couldn't continue independently, and the company became part of Takamatsu Construction Group. While independent ownership didn't survive, the craftsmanship did. The company's head carpenter, Yoshihito Kongō, is a 41st-generation descendant of the original Kongō family, and Kongō Gumi still builds and restores temples as part of what Takamatsu calls a "socially meaningful corporate group" focused on preservation and protection of cultural properties.
The organization changed. The ownership changed. At one point, even the product changed. But what mattered most to the identity of the company remained.
Sometimes staying true to what you're building requires changing what you've built.
That's organizational resilience that is far more meaningful than "surviving disruption." You're thinking beyond whether the organization survives and exploring what survives WITH it.
I've watched several seemingly unrelated stories unfold in the news... and you know how I love to connect the dots on seemingly unrelated things!
A nuclear power company, an airline, a property developer, an antitrust lawsuit, and a performing arts center. Different organizations. Different pressures. Same underlying problem:
What are we actually trying to preserve here?
Take Chubu Electric Power. An independent investigation found that safety data used in the regulatory process had been manipulated in order to get the go-ahead to restart nuclear reactors.
I'm sorry, WHAT?!?
Thankfully a whistleblower came forward, which started the investigation. The restart applications were withdrawn, and the company's president and chairman announced their resignations.
Look, I get the desire to get things back online, but before you flip the switch on a nuclear power plant (ESPECIALLY a nuclear power plant!), you need to be honest about whether or not it is safe to do so! That means taking the time to do things right. Once you've decided what the evidence needs to say, you're not really gathering evidence anymore. You're gathering permission.
A value that disappears the moment it becomes expensive isn't much of a value. It's easy to value safety when safety and profitability align, or to value integrity when telling the truth doesn't jeopardize the plan. Values get interesting when they cost you something.
You don't necessarily need some cartoon villain in the executive suite ordering people to falsify data. People learn what the organization rewards and respond accordingly. They learn which answers keep things moving and which answers make them the obstacle. Eventually, leadership can find itself surrounded by evidence supporting the decision it wanted to make instead of the decision that's right.
I'm not saying profit is bad or that a values-aligned organization never makes a decision that hurts somebody. Sometimes responsible stewardship requires painful decisions.
Values don't eliminate tradeoffs. They help you decide how you'll navigate them.
When Meatloaf sang "I would do anything for love, but I won't do that" he probably wasn't thinking about the organizational impact of that message. I think it's a great reflection question! What are you willing to lose rather than become an organization you don't want to be?
THOSE are values questions. And sometimes the answer gets messy.
The current fight over AI safety is a great example.
In September, a lawsuit accused Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of illegally coordinating efforts to slow AI development.
The plaintiffs are basically saying that a company can decide to slow its own development because it believes doing so is safer, but when competitors coordinate that restraint, it's a problem.
So, imagine you genuinely believe slowing development is the responsible choice. You slow down, but your competitors don't. They get "there" first. Your customers start jumping ship. Investors start wondering why you're deliberately handicapping the company, when you've got a duty to shareholders to maximize profits.
Suddenly, "safety is one of our values" has a price tag.
But the other side isn't simple either. Do we really want a handful of the world's most powerful AI companies privately deciding among themselves how quickly this technology should advance?
Safety, competition, and innovation aren't more or less important than accountability. Same for all the people groups involved... including the people who may eventually live with consequences nobody can fully predict. Everybody can't get everything they want.
Welcome to leadership.
Decisions don't happen in a vacuum. Some of the Conditions for Success are within our control. Some we can influence. Others are external conditions we mostly have to recognize and account for. And then there's DKDK: the stuff you don't know that you don't know.
You can have Clarity about the organization you're trying to create, Conviction about what matters, and the Courage to act accordingly—and reality can still say, "nope" when a regulator changes the rules. Or financing disappears. Or new technology blows up the business model. Something you didn't even know to anticipate becomes the thing that determines whether your plan succeeds.
Resilience isn't the ability to control the conditions. It's the ability to remain recognizably yourself as the conditions change.
Adaptation asks: What needs to change?
Identity asks: What must remain true?
You need both. Refuse to adapt because "this is who we are," and identity becomes rigidity. Change everything whenever circumstances get difficult, and adaptation becomes and identity crisis.
That's exactly where I'm swimming right now with my own company transformation. There are plenty of things that are easy to change. But what remains true? That's been a tougher conversation.
This week, I read that Latvia's airBaltic started talking about workforce reductions while the airline was still figuring out what the company's going to look like on the other side of restructuring. It doesn't matter if you're a business of one or millions. If you haven't decided what kind of business you're trying to build, how the hell are you supposed to decide what belongs in it?
Then there's Bathla Group in Australia. The property developer had billions of dollars in creditor claims. Administrators asked for more time to work through the administration, except time wasn't really the problem. Five days later, administrators said they couldn't get more funding to continue projects and everything was shutting down.
Solving the wrong problem doesn't actually solve anything. More time only solves a time problem... and if time isn't the real problem, you're just delaying the inevitable. Find the Condition for Success that's actually at issue and work from there.
I tell clients all the time that you train people how to treat you, based on what you've come to accept from them and what they've come to expect from you. Every consequential decision teaches people something about the organization. It tells employees whether inconvenient information is welcome. It tells customers what happens when their interests collide with profitability. It tells investors how leadership understands stewardship. It tells communities whether they're stakeholders or obstacles.
Those decisions accumulate.
So, yeah, the logo can still be on the building. Revenue can still be coming in. Everybody that wasn't let go can still show up for work on Monday, and technically, the organization survived. But the thing you thought you were preserving may already be gone.
Here's a hot-button example in the making. In September, the Kennedy Center board approved closing the performing arts complex for up to two years to complete renovations. Our current President then essentially held those renovations hostage in order to get the building renamed in his honor.
Political opinions aside (mostly), the Kennedy Center has a cultural mission, congressional funding, and a public legacy. When those things collide with other interests, what are you actually trying to preserve? That's the decision that matters!
I don't have a nuclear reactor. Nobody's giving me $257 million to renovate anything. I'm definitely not determining the future of artificial intelligence. But the question is still important for me to answer, regardless of my scale.
There are things I've built that have served people well. There's work I've done for years that still matters to me. There are things people know me for that I could keep doing simply because I've always done them.
None of that automatically means those things belong in the organization I'm building next. That's uncomfortable. But that's also the work.
Clarity asks: What kind of organization am I actually trying to create?
Conviction asks: What must remain true, even when honoring it costs me something?
Courage asks: Am I willing to change what needs to change without sacrificing the things that made this worth building in the first place?
I don't control all my Conditions for Success. No one does. But we do get to decide how we respond to them.
Leaders spend plenty of time asking what they're willing to do to survive. What will we cut, sell, automate, stop doing, or postpone? Swell, but take a cue from Meatloaf, and ask this one, too:
What are we unwilling to do/become in order to survive?
Because if there's no answer, survival itself becomes the highest value.
Once survival is the highest value, almost anything can be justified in its name. That's when values become nothing more than the "live, laugh, love" wall art of the office.
So I'm asking three questions in my own business right now, inspired by Kongō Gumi, Meatloaf, and the happenings around the world last week:
I'm not ready to share those answers yet, but I'm getting clearer about what I'm trying to preserve.
Sometimes staying true to what you're building requires changing what you've built. The invitation then is to preserve what makes the organization worth keeping alive while changing what must change so that it can endure. Because the decisions we're making today aren't merely determining whether our organizations survive. They're determining what survives.