“The leader who built the system is often the last person to see when the system needs to change.”
There is a particular rigidity that can develop in leaders who have achieved significant results — a quiet conviction that the way they did things is the way things should be done. It is understandable. They earned the right to that conviction through hard work and real outcomes. But conviction, over time, can calcify into resistance. And the leader who once drove transformation begins to slow it down, particularly when the proposed change comes from someone younger, or lower in the hierarchy, or without the same pedigree.
What is at stake here is not just efficiency or innovation. It is talent. People who see a better way and are consistently discouraged from pursuing it do not stay. They leave — and they take the organisation’s future capacity with them. The leaders who remain genuinely relevant across decades are those who maintain the intellectual honesty to be wrong in public. Who can say: this is better than what I built. That is not a concession of failure. It is the clearest possible signal of real confidence.
The uncomfortable question
Is there something in your organisation that has not been challenged in years — not because it works, but because it is yours?
Staying relevant is not about defending what worked. It is about remaining open to what works now.
Mustafa Kamal