The Cost of Mediocrity

As organizations succeed and grow, they become more formalized, more bureaucratic, more careful, more remote from customers, and slower to act. Diseconomies of scale begin to work, overshadowing the cost advantages of size. Overhead grows, decision-making slows. Direct feedback from customers is reduced, filtered, and often ignored. The demon of af

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For many years, the conventional wisdom held that corporate executives should focus on maximizing shareholder value, and this goal was reinforced by compensating executives with stocks.4 However, these strategies have a number of flaws. They create a bias towards short-term results (such as quarterly earnings) at the expense of longer-term prioriti

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Whilst incumbents might gravitate to jumping on the latest trend bandwagon or worse – playing into a lazy audience insight – Challengers lean into the fact that they have set themselves ambitions that might feel bigger than their brand. They continually find ways to recontextualise and evolve their message to keep them fresh.