Reinvention isn’t a response to crisis. It’s what stops a crisis from happening in the first place.
Most companies don’t fail because they’re bad businesses. They fail because they assume today’s success guarantees tomorrow’s relevance. They wait until decline is unavoidable, then scramble to reinvent—usually too late.
The reality is brutal: only one in ten companies that attempt reinvention after they’ve started declining ever manage to bounce back. By the time a company starts talking about reinvention in board meetings, it’s often because something is already broken. The market has moved on. Customers have found better alternatives. The forces pulling a business under—dwindling relevance, financial constraints, internal resistance—are often stronger than the reinvention itself.
Reinvention isn’t a lifeline. It’s a mindset. And it has to happen before it’s needed.
From a position of strength
I’ve worked with enough organisations to know that transformation rarely happens in good times. Companies grow comfortable. Their models work. Their customers stay loyal. The product that once felt indispensable still sells. Nothing feels urgent.
This is exactly when they should be reinventing their business. But reinvention feels too risky, too disruptive, too unnecessary. So they hold on. And then, slowly, the cracks appear. Margins shrink. Competitors move faster. Stagnation, once unthinkable, becomes inevitable.
By the time they act, reinvention is no longer a strategy—it’s an emergency response. And reinvention driven by decline is rarely radical enough. It’s defensive. It’s cautious. It focuses on fixing rather than creating. It’s constrained—by diminished resources, nervous leadership, a lack of time.
True reinvention requires freedom to experiment, and that’s a luxury few companies have when they are already struggling to survive.
An act of confidence, not desperation
The companies that survive across decades don’t wait for reinvention to become urgent. They do it before they need to.
Netflix didn’t wait for DVD rentals to decline before pivoting to streaming. Apple didn’t cling to computers—it moved into music, then phones, then services. Microsoft reinvented itself as a cloud-first business while Windows was still dominant. They weren’t reacting. They were shaping what came next.
Contrast that with the companies that waited too long. Kodak tried to embrace digital photography—but only after its film business had collapsed. Nokia attempted a smartphone reinvention—but only after Apple and Android had already made it irrelevant. Blockbuster saw streaming coming but hesitated, convinced its physical stores would still matter.
They didn’t fail because they didn’t try to reinvent themselves. They failed because they tried too late.
A business in decline doesn’t have the luxury of patience. It needs results fast. But reinvention takes time. It requires experimentation, risk-taking, the willingness to abandon old models before the new ones are fully formed.
That’s a near-impossible ask when survival is on the line. But the future doesn’t wait.
Reinvention isn’t about turning things around. It’s about never needing to.
The companies that lead industries aren’t the ones responding to change. They’re the ones creating it.
Reinvention isn’t a crisis strategy. It’s the strategy that stops a crisis from happening.
So the real question isn’t How do you turn things around?—it’s Are you willing to change before you have to? Because if you wait, it’s already too late.
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