Humility, discipline, curiosity, and commitment to truth are essential to continued success, contends LINUS OKORIE
Business history is filled with once-dominant companies that seemed invincible until they weren’t. Kodak owned digital photography patents but clung to film. Nokia controlled 40% of the global mobile phone market in 2007 before the smartphone revolution swept past them. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores at its peak and dismissed Netflix as a niche player. These failures weren’t caused by bad luck or disruptive technology alone; they were self-inflicted wounds that began at the top, in the executive suites where success had bred a dangerous form of arrogance.
Jim Collins refers to this phenomenon as the most dangerous stage of organizational decline. It is called Hubris Born of Success. Understanding this stage is essential for any leader who wants to sustain excellence across generations. Unbelievable yet true, that the very success that validates your decisions can become the poison that kills the organization you built. This is a paradox.
Success is intoxicating and very seducing. When strategies work, when markets respond, or when profits soar, leaders naturally feel validated. This validation becomes reinforcement, and reinforcement hardens into conviction. Over time, leaders begin to credit success primarily to their vision, their decisions, their leadership. Rather than humbly acknowledge that it is a mix of factors which includes timing, market conditions, talented teams, and sometimes simple luck.
Research shows that 70% of CEOs believe their company’s success is due to their unique capabilities rather than favorable market conditions. This fundamentally changes how leaders process information and make decisions. They begin to believe they have discovered permanent truths about their industry or possess special insights that others lack. The hunger that drove the organization to success gets replaced by the assumption that success is the natural order of things.
Hubris-filled leaders often lose sight of the core values and practices that made their organizations great in the first place. They start believing that practically anything they touch will turn to gold, that normal rules don’t apply to them, that they can succeed in areas far removed from what they actually know. The discipline that built the foundation of success gets abandoned for bold moves that feel innovative but are actually reckless.
The role of leadership cannot be overstated. Leaders set the tone, establish the culture, and make the critical strategic decisions that either sustain vitality or begin the descent. When leaders fall into hubris, several dangerous patterns emerge.
First, they surround themselves with people who confirm rather than challenge their views. Studies show that companies in decline have 50% less constructive conflict in their leadership teams compared to thriving organizations. The robust debate that once characterized leadership meetings gives way to choreographed agreement. Talented people who might question the prevailing wisdom either leave the organization or learn to stay quiet. The diversity of thought that serves as an early warning system gets systematically eliminated.
Second, hubristic leaders abandon the vigilance that keeps great leaders scanning the horizon for threats and opportunities. Instead of asking “What could go wrong?” or “What are we missing?”, they ask “How can we capitalize on our obvious superiority?” The watchfulness that success requires gets replaced by complacency that failure feeds upon.
Third, these leaders make increasingly bold decisions with decreasing rigor. Because previous big bets paid off, they assume future ones will too. They confuse confidence with competence and momentum with invincibility. Due diligence becomes a formality rather than a genuine inquiry. Data that contradicts their assumptions gets dismissed or explained away.
Finally, hubristic leaders often pursue growth for growth’s sake, expanding into markets or product lines where they lack expertise. They believe their success in one area transfers automatically to others. This overreach stretches resources, dilutes focus, and exposes the organization to risks it doesn’t fully understand. A McKinsey study found that companies that diversified beyond their core business had a 60% higher failure rate than those that maintained focus.
What makes hubris so dangerous is its stealth. Unlike a sudden market shock or competitive threat, hubris operates quietly, compounding over time. The organization may still be growing, and still making profits. Success metrics don’t immediately reveal the rot setting in. This is why decline is often well underway before it becomes visible. Research shows that the average company experiences 7-10 years of internal deterioration before external manifestations.
Leaders in this stage often interpret continued success as evidence that their approach is working, not recognizing that they are coasting on momentum generated by earlier, more disciplined efforts. They are living off accumulated goodwill, brand strength, and market position while eroding the foundations that created those advantages.
52% of Fortune 500 companies from 2000 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist. Many of these failures began not with obvious mistakes but with the subtle arrogance that success breeds.
If leadership creates the conditions for decline, leadership must also provide the cure. The good news is that hubris born of success is a choice, or more accurately, a series of choices that leaders make about how they interpret success and what they do with it.
The first and most crucial strategy is building genuine humility into your organization. Great leaders credit success to factors beyond themselves. They recognize the role of timing, market conditions, team contributions, and yes, luck. When leaders practice humility, they remain students of their business rather than presumed masters of it. They stay hungry, curious, and open to information that challenges their assumptions.
Effective leaders create systems that ensure they hear what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. This might mean creating a formal “devil’s advocate” role in strategic planning, conducting rigorous pre-mortems where teams identify what could cause a proposed initiative to fail, or establishing direct channels for employees at all levels to raise concerns. The key is making dissent not just safe but valued.
Leaders must maintain disciplined thinking and action, not bureaucratic rules, but disciplined people engaging in disciplined thought. This means being rigorous about staying within your core strengths. It means saying no to opportunities that don’t fit, regardless of how attractive they appear. It means keeping the same standards of analysis that applied when your organization was fighting for survival. 83% of successful strategic decisions involve saying no to seemingly attractive opportunities that don’t align with core competencies.
Great leaders make decisions based on evidence and fundamental principles rather than on what would validate their self-image or previous positions. They are willing to admit mistakes quickly and change course without viewing it as a personal defeat. This psychological flexibility is perhaps the most important defense against hubris.
After successes, the question shouldn’t just be “What did we do right?” but “What role did factors outside our control play?” and “What could we have done better?” This prevents your organization from drawing overly confident conclusions from positive outcomes.
Companies that conduct thorough post-mortems on both successes and failures are 2.5 times more likely to adapt successfully to market changes than those that only analyze failures.
Avoiding hubris born of success is an ongoing practice that requires constant attention. It means regularly examining your own assumptions, actively seeking perspectives that differ from your own, and maintaining the discipline that built success even when that discipline feels unnecessary.
The ultimate irony is that the leaders most at risk are often those who have been most successful. Their track record gives them credibility and authority, which makes it harder for others to challenge them and easier for them to dismiss challenges. Breaking this cycle requires conscious effort and institutional safeguards.
Organizations don’t fail because they lack talent, resources, or market position. They fail because success made them arrogant, and arrogance made them blind. Your role as a leader is to ensure that you create the conditions for sustained excellence that can weather whatever challenges emerge.
Success is not the enemy. But left unchecked, the arrogance it breeds certainly is. Therefore, the question every successful leader must ask is “How do I ensure our success doesn’t destroy us?” The answer lies in the same qualities that built success in the first place: humility, discipline, curiosity, and an unwavering commitment to truth over comfort.
Okorie MFR is a leadership development expert spanning 30 years in the research, teaching and coaching of leadership in Africa and across the world. He is the CEO of the GOTNI Leadership Centre
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