Success as inertia: the cost of surviving too long

My professional insights · Lyudmil Karaulanov · 10 min read

Published: 1 August 2026 · Version 1.0

There is a particular satisfaction in saying that your business has come through several crises. Behind those words lie decisions, sacrifices and efforts that outsiders do not always see. That history deserves respect.

At the same time, it is worth calmly asking what sustains the company today. Does it continue to create value, or do we keep sustaining it because it is difficult to imagine another direction? This is a delicate conversation for anyone who has invested a significant part of their life in a venture.

The advantage of not being first

The first entrant pays for knowledge that those who follow will use. They educate customers, test demand, make the visible mistakes and show competitors what works.

The later entrant can observe. They lack the pioneer's aura, but have the advantage of other people's experience. They can choose a better moment, a leaner structure or a different route to the customer.

This does not mean that slowness is a strategy. Delay is useful only if it has been used to understand. Otherwise, the last entrant is not patient, merely late. The real advantage lies in knowing not to join every race and entering the game when the balance between opportunity and risk has become more favourable.

A long life does not necessarily mean resilience

A business with a history commands natural respect. If an organisation has survived economic cycles and changes in customers, technologies and generations, its very survival conveys information.

Related to this is the idea known as the Lindy effect, popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: for ideas, technologies and other phenomena without a natural expiry date, elapsed time offers a clue to how likely they are to continue to exist.

For a business, this reasoning is only a guide. A company is not a single, unchanging thing. It combines people, capital, technologies, relationships and demand, each of which ages differently. A business's age does not automatically prove its vitality. What matters is not only how long it has existed, but why.

The organisation may have survived because of its ability to change. But it may also have been protected by a monopoly position, regulation, cheap capital, one large customer, the owner's personal sacrifices or the constant postponement of investment. In the first case, time is a test the business has passed. In the second, it has concealed an accumulating weakness.

Over time, the structure also begins to carry a burden of its own: more management layers, more rules, more expensive coordination and a stronger attachment to decisions that were once right. The process created to serve the business gradually becomes a reason for the business to serve the process.

Jeff Bezos describes such a state as "Day 2": stasis, followed by irrelevance, painful decline and death. What matters in his warning is that an established company may live in this stasis for decades before the outcome becomes obvious.

A long life can therefore be capital, but it can also be inertia. The difference lies in whether the accumulated past improves the next decision or predetermines it.

For the owner, the real question is not simply whether the business can continue, but whether continuing still preserves and creates value. An organisation may survive while exhausting the capital, time and freedom of the person who owns it.

Giving up something you are good at

The hardest work to leave behind is work we do well and through which we have been useful for years. Stepping back from a role may feel like losing one's place. But it can also provide an opportunity to use our experience differently, provided the organisation is ready to take over what we leave behind.

In business, this could mean the owner periodically parting not necessarily with an asset, but with one of their established roles. No longer personally approving every payment. Giving up the lead in every important negotiation. Closing a product to which they are attached. Making room for a decision taken in a way different from their own.

This gradual withdrawal reveals which tasks the organisation can already carry and where it still needs the owner. If something stops, that is useful information for the next stage of preparation, not a reason to reproach the owner or the team.

The outside perspective

An outsider sometimes notices more readily that a task no longer serves its purpose. They do not carry all the daily commitments that keep you doing it. This distance is valuable, provided the advice takes account of the real people, time frames and costs involved in the change.

This is one possible role of an advisory board: a group of people who do not manage the business directly, but examine its assumptions, risks and strategic choices. An outside perspective can free the organisation from the short memory of the operational day.

Distance, however, also has a cost. The outsider does not fully feel the resistance of reality. They do not carry the customer relationships, tension in the team, shortage of cash or consequences of the decision on Monday morning. Advice from a distance may therefore be clearer, but also too neat.

Advice without risk

This is where Taleb's objection arises. The problem is not that the adviser has no stake in the company. It is the asymmetry: the adviser may receive recognition for success, while the cost of error remains with the owner, employees and creditors.

In a joint publication on risk, Taleb and Constantine Sandis defend the principle that anyone proposing an action capable of harming others should bear some of its consequences. They also formulate a particularly useful rule: "Do not tell people what you think, tell them what you have in your portfolio."

Personally bearing some consequences does not necessarily mean committing money, however. It may mean a risk to professional reputation, an ongoing commitment to implementation or an obligation for the adviser to remain alongside the organisation after the consequences of the advice become visible. A one-off opinion is easy. Returning two years later to see what it produced is harder.

Distance without losing touch with reality

Personal risk gives us a strong incentive to be careful, but does not necessarily make us impartial. When a project holds our money, history and name, ending it can seem unbearable. Here an outside perspective is valuable if it helps us see the possibilities without minimising their cost to us.

Someone fully in the game knows the cost of decisions, but may lose perspective. Someone entirely outside it sees the wider picture, but may underestimate the cost. A sound management structure does not choose between the two. It brings their different limitations together.

An advisory board is valuable when it neither replaces the decision-making body nor relieves the owner of responsibility. Its task is to question assumptions, compare time horizons and reveal possibilities that day-to-day management does not see. The decision, however, remains with the person authorised to make it and who will bear its consequences. A good adviser is close enough to understand the business and independent enough not to begin defending its habits.

Where is the point of instability?

What this concept means →

It arises when past success ceases to be a source of experience and begins to determine every subsequent choice. Continuing then seems the only honourable option, even when it consumes the value we want to preserve.

That is why I believe there is also a place for selling, restructuring or withdrawing from a particular activity. Such a decision can be part of caring for what has been created when it is considered in time and on today's terms, without expecting the future necessarily to repeat the best years of the past.

This material is of a general analytical nature and does not constitute individual legal, tax, financial or investment advice.