After more than 30 years in business, and as I now begin teaching strategy and marketing, I find myself returning to one recurring problem.
The ideas that travel best inside organizations are often the least reliable, and the ideas that are most reliable often struggle to travel at all.
Simple lessons spread because they are memorable. They fit into a slide, a leadership presentation or a best-practice document. People can repeat them and act on them. The trouble is that reality rarely arrives in such a convenient format.
The more carefully you examine why a brand grew or a strategy worked, the more complexity appears. It turns out timing and distribution mattered. Competitors made mistakes or market conditions shifted. Some decisions helped, while others were irrelevant. A few may even have been lucky.
Soon the explanation becomes difficult to summarize. It is accurate, but full of caveats and cumbersome.
That is the dilemma: The version of the story that is simple enough to be useful is often too simplified to be trusted; the version that is nuanced enough to be trusted is often too complicated to be useful.
Most management thinking lives somewhere inside that uncomfortable gap.
Business media, consultants and executives all contribute to the process. A success story becomes a lesson. The lesson becomes a best practice, then a framework, then a recipe. Eventually, what started as an observation acquires the status of a law. Yet, at every step, information is lost.
This is not because people are dishonest. It is because organizations need portable knowledge. Nobody wants a four-page explanation with seven caveats. They want the headline. Unfortunately, the headline is often where the trouble begins.
The Winning-Dots Trap
Phil Rosenzweig described one version of this problem brilliantly in The Halo Effect. When companies succeed, observers naturally search for explanations. They look at winners, identify common behaviors and then assume those behaviors caused the success. The logic is seductive because it feels empirical.
Winning companies innovate more? Therefore, innovation probably explains the win.
Winning companies invest more in sustainability, diversity and culture? Therefore, these must be the secret sauce of success.
But this is where the reasoning often breaks down. We have only looked at the winners.
Imagine that we study 10 successful brands and find that eight of them launched major line extensions in the previous three years. The conclusion seems obvious: Line extensions are a key driver of success.
But now imagine we study 10 struggling brands in the same category and discover that eight of them also launched major line extensions. Suddenly, the lesson looks much weaker. It may simply be an activity that many ambitious brands attempt, with very different outcomes.
Or the direction of causality may run the other way: Successful brands may extend more because they are already winning. They have stronger distribution, more retailer support, larger budgets and greater internal confidence. The extension is not the engine of growth, but one of the privileges of growth.
This is the winning-dots trap. We look at the dots around winners and forget to ask whether the same dots also appear around losers.
Consultants, myself included during my years in strategy consulting, have been guilty of this for decades. We study outperformers, name the pattern, polish it into a framework and present it as if we have discovered a law of management physics. But, of course, patterns are not causes.
Success Rewrites Its Own History
The danger is not limited to outsiders. Companies frequently misdiagnose their own success.
The physicist Richard Feynman once warned that the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and that you are the easiest person to fool.
Business is no exception.
When results are strong, human beings naturally attribute performance to their own decisions. Speed becomes agility. Boldness becomes vision. Luck is promoted as merit.
When results deteriorate, the same behaviors are often reinterpreted in reverse. Agility is seen as improvisation. Consistency becomes rigidity. Discipline is reclassified as bureaucracy. What once looked like strategic courage suddenly looks like poor judgment.
That is the strange power of performance: It changes the story we tell ourselves about the behaviors that produced them.
I saw this in ultra-premium spirits at Suntory. For a while, expensive whisky limited-editions appeared to sell because of the quality of our storytelling, the desirability of our collaborations and the strength of our brand-building. Some of that was true. The work was good.
But when the market turned, the story became more complicated. Many supposed ‘collectors’ disappeared. Some had been speculators riding a rising market. Scarcity, price momentum and the belief that bottles would appreciate over time had been doing more work than we wanted to admit.
That did not make the brands weak, or the marketing work irrelevant. It simply meant that our explanation had been too flattering. We had mistaken part of the success for the whole cause of it.
This is how success fools intelligent people. It does not usually lie outright. It edits the story. It leaves in the decisions that make us look skillful and cuts the conditions that made those decisions effective.
The Executive Dilemma
Managers need simplification because action requires clarity. Students need simplification because learning requires structure. In both cases, endless caveats kill usefulness.
The problem begins when simplification stops being a teaching device and starts being treated as truth.
Whenever a management idea sounds universally true, it is worth asking a better question.
Not simply: “What did the winners do?”
More precisely: “Under what conditions did this work?”
This is why case studies remain so powerful when they are taught properly. For students, they make complexity visible: the timing, trade-offs, constraints, economics, competitive dynamics and imperfect information behind every decision. For executives, they are a useful reminder that every success happened somewhere, sometime, under specific conditions.
Success should inspire. It should make us curious. But it should not be allowed to teach too quickly.
Practices create value under specific conditions. A tactic that works brilliantly in a fast-growing category may fail in a mature one. A premium-brand playbook may be economically irrational for a value brand. What succeeds with abundant distribution may fail with limited availability.
Every simplification removes information. The leadership challenge is to remember what has been lost in the process.
