Why the Companies That Endure Change the Right Things
Most companies don’t fail because they can’t change. They fail because they change the wrong things. In periods of disruption or regression, leaders often rush to adjust what’s most visible on the chessboard while abandoning the one thing that ultimately determines whether change will work at all: clarity about what business they are really in.
The companies that endure are not the ones that change the fastest but the ones that are clearest about what must persist. That confusion sits at the heart of why so many transformation efforts disappoint. Companies conflate what they do with how they’re structured, what they sell or what assets they own. When markets shift or technologies emerge, they rearrange the visible pieces of the enterprise instead of reexamining the enduring problems they were built to solve. This is why change, on its own, is not a strategy. Enduring companies don’t grow by reinventing themselves every time the world changes. They grow by reinterpreting their founding purposes as conditions evolve. When an organization’s purpose is clear, change becomes directional. When it’s not, change becomes reactive.
For years, I’ve pointed leaders to Bain’s “Founder’s Mentality” framework because it offers a useful lens for understanding this dynamic. A “Founder’s Mentality” is not about founders themselves. It’s not about origin stories, reverence or artifacts preserved in a lobby. At its core, it describes a way of operating that resists the gravitational pull of complexity as organizations scale. Bain defines the “Founder’s Mentality” through three attributes: an insurgent mission, an owner’s mindset and a frontline obsession. Together, these describe behaviors—how decisions are made, how accountability is distributed and how close leaders remain to customers. But success, scale and time have a way of eroding those behaviors. Complexity creeps in. Layers form. Missions blur. Companies don’t stop changing, but they begin changing without a compass.
In recent months, a complementary idea has gained traction through research and teaching at the Yale School of Management: refounding. Recent articles in the Economist, the New York Times and Forbes offer different takes on the idea that Yale’s Jon Iwata originated. Where the “Founder’s Mentality” focuses on behavior, refounding addresses something deeper—corporate memory, knowledge, character and identity. It confronts what happens when organizations lose touch with why they exist in the first place. Refounding is not about going backward. It is about recovering what scale, success and distraction have buried. It begins with acknowledging “institutional drift,” the slow accumulation of rational decisions that gradually pull an organization away from its original character. Drift rarely feels like failure. It often feels like progress. New markets, new assets and new revenue streams are not bad things—yet over time they can obscure the original problem a company was built to solve.
The “Founder’s Mentality” and refounding are not interchangeable. One helps organizations preserve the behaviors that fuel growth, while the other helps them reconnect with the identities and purposes that give those behaviors meaning. Together, they explain why so many transformations fail—not because companies move too slowly but because they move without clarity about what must endure. All of this can sound academic until you’re forced to confront it inside your own organization. Last week, our team gathered for History Factory’s annual meeting, where we celebrated the launch of Chroniqle, our new AI platform, exactly one year to the day after first unveiling our vision for it. Chroniqle is an important innovation for History Factory, but it is not a reinvention of who we are. It is a new way of delivering on the same vision we have always held: empowering enterprises to make history infinitely useful in pursuit of their missions.
Over the past couple of years, we have approached the emergence of AI as a simultaneous opportunity and potential existential threat if we didn’t embrace and adapt with it. We’ve stayed focused on what problems we’re actually solving and how new tools might allow us to approach them differently. Answering those questions has meant pushing beyond how we are currently structured and the services that we have historically delivered. It has meant developing a capability that, in the near term, may even cannibalize parts of our existing business but that will create significantly more opportunity over time. In other words, we chose purpose over preservation. This isn’t new territory for us. Much of the work we do with clients every day is about navigating this exact tension of moving forward with confidence while preserving and advocating for what must endure.
Our experience is hardly unique. It is simply what organizations confront when moments of change expose the gaps between what they do and who they are. Some respond by optimizing the present. Others recognize the opportunity to reinterpret their purposes and build futures that remain true to them.
The media industry provides a clear illustration of how organizations respond in these moments. After the apex of print in the late 1990s, many media companies struggled. Tribune Media is a cautionary example of what happens when asset ownership begins to replace identity. As the organization diversified across newspapers, real estate and broadcast holdings, its sense of what business it was really in fractured. What remained was a portfolio of assets, not a coherent mission. The New York Times took a different path. After its own period of drift, it refocused with discipline on a single mission: producing journalism worth paying for. The Times is 175 this year and as relevant as ever. The current turmoil at the Washington Post offers a more unsettling lesson. Unlike Tribune, the Post was not starved of capital, nor was its loss of customers inevitable. Owned by one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, its implosion reflects not a lack of resources but an absence of sustained commitment to what must endure. Identity and purpose, even when widely admired, cannot sustain themselves without active stewardship. The Post’s predicament is troubling precisely because it didn’t have to happen.
Pressures from technology, markets and society will only intensify. Change is inevitable. The real question leaders must confront is not whether they are transforming fast enough but whether they still know—clearly and confidently—what businesses they are really in.