CEO's column September 2026
When the business is growing, customers are happy, and results look strong, few people will ask for change. But that can be when the company becomes most vulnerable.
When the numbers look good, customers stay and business is rolling along, there is rarely anyone who asks for change. But according to Mikael Nylund, that is often when the greatest risk arises. In this month's column, he discusses why success can be one of the most dangerous states of a company, and why organizations that dare to challenge themselves while still doing well are often the ones that stand strongest when the world around them changes.
When success becomes the company's biggest risk
They say that those who go to sleep a winner risk waking up a loser. It may sound like something taken from a coffee mug at a kickoff, but behind the cliché lies an unpleasant truth about both people and companies: success is not only something to strive for, it can also make us comfortable.
Because the most dangerous thing that can happen to an organization is sometimes that everything works.
The customers are still there, the revenue is coming in, the employees know their jobs and the management team knows the business inside and out. The processes are in place and the calendar is full of recurring meetings that are held with such regularity that no one really remembers who once decided they were needed.
Moreover, when the business delivers, there is rarely any urgent reason to change anything.
And that's about where the problems can start.
Success is an effective anesthetic
Companies rarely go from successful to irrelevant overnight. The change happens much more undramatically, through slightly fewer new customers, longer decision-making processes, squeezed margins or a competitor who suddenly seems to understand the market a little better.
The salespeople note that customers have become more difficult to flirt with, the management that the market has become tougher, and the CFO that costs need to be reviewed. Each change can be explained, but together they can start to tell a different story.
When a company is doing poorly, almost everything is questioned: the strategy, the organization, the costs, the offering and the leadership. When the same company is doing well, the tendency to question is considerably less, which is of course human. If customers are buying, profits are coming in and the business is growing, there is little rational reason to start dismantling the machine to investigate why it works.
The problem is that yesterday's successes have an unpleasant tendency to turn into tomorrow's truths.
Our customers want it that way. In our industry, it works differently. We've already tried it. It doesn't fit our culture.
And then perhaps the most expensive sentence of all: This is how we've always done it.
It is rarely a strategy, although surprisingly many companies seem to treat it as one.
The comfortable organization is often very busy
It's easy to imagine a comfortable organization as a place where people sit back and live on old credentials, but my experience is rather the opposite.
Calendars are full, inboxes are overflowing, meetings are happening one after another, presentations are being produced and forecasts are being updated. Project groups are being formed and steering groups are following up on the project groups, which means that almost everyone can go home with the feeling of having had a lot to do.
The question is whether all this work actually moves the business.
Because activity and change are not the same thing, and an organization can work harder than ever while in practice standing almost completely still.
This is especially evident in sales. We have never had better CRM systems, more data or greater opportunities to understand our customers, and now we have AI that can help us do almost everything faster. Yet a sales organization can spend an enormous amount of time on internal meetings, administration and existing customers, while the number of real conversations with new customers is surprisingly low.
Similarly, a manager can have a calendar full from morning to night and yet almost never see their employees at work, attend a customer meeting or provide concrete feedback.
We have become very adept at being busy, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have become better.
Everyone wants to change – as long as nothing needs to change
Almost every management team I meet today talks about change: AI, new customer behaviors, efficiency, skills supply, new business models, and an environment that seems to have decided to increase the pace a few more laps.
The conclusion is almost always the same: we need to change faster.
The problem arises when change moves from Powerpoint to Monday morning, because real change almost always means someone needs to stop doing something that the person is good at, feels comfortable with, or perhaps has built a large part of their career around.
It is much easier to decide on a new strategy than to change an old behavior, especially when the old one still works reasonably well.
Therefore, I believe that one of the most important questions a management team can ask itself is not about what the company needs to start doing, but about what it needs to stop doing.
What meetings would no one miss if they disappeared? What working methods have played out their role? What old truths about customers need to be reexamined? What behaviors do we accept because they still work, even though we know they may not be sufficient tomorrow?
And perhaps most importantly: What are we doing today simply because it worked yesterday?
Safe people. Unsafe truths.
There is an important difference between a safe organization and a comfortable organization, two concepts that are sometimes confused even though they describe completely different things.
In a safe organization, people dare to say that the boss is wrong, question decisions, try new things, ask for help, and admit when something didn't work. In the comfortable organization, however, there is a tacit agreement not to mess too much with things that seem to work.
I believe a lot in safety for people, but significantly less in safety for working methods.
In a strong organization, no process, product, meeting structure, or old truth should have job security. Everything must be questionable, not for the sake of change itself, but because the outside world shows very little respect for how satisfied we have become with our own solutions.
Customers and competitors are hardly waiting for us to feel ready.
The hardest thing is to change when things are going well.
The truly difficult leadership therefore does not begin when the crisis is already a fact. When the numbers are red, customers are disappearing and the bank starts asking questions, a whole day of willingness to change is rarely needed, because by then most people have already understood the message.
The hard thing is to change when the numbers are still black.
Questioning a business model that still makes money, training people who are already talented, developing a sales organization that still hits budget, and investing in something new while the old one still delivers requires significantly more from management than acting when alternatives have already been exhausted.
Perhaps this is also where a large part of the competitiveness of the future will be decided, not between companies that have understood that the world is changing and companies that have not, but between organizations that are able to challenge themselves while still being successful and those that need to feel the pain before the change becomes urgent enough.
Of course, someone who goes to sleep as a winner doesn't automatically wake up as a loser, but someone who starts to view yesterday's victory as proof that tomorrow will be the same has given their competitors a pretty comfortable lead.
That's perhaps the most treacherous thing about the comfortable organization: you rarely notice that you've become part of it until someone else has already run past.
Mikael Nylund, CEO, Mindit – the House of Sales & Leadership