Everything works smoothly until… it doesn’t.
I remember how my partner and I went to Riga in 2010 to explore real estate opportunities. Banks dumped prime assets on foreclosure auctions—trophies grabbed for bad debts.
There was just one problem. Banks had frozen lending. They had burned themselves badly not long before. A year earlier, unemployed twenty-somethings were freely buying multiple apartments on credit.
Yesterday, bank leadership was driven mad by greed. Today, by fear.
Earlier, in the advertising business, I saw the same cycle more than once. For several years, everyone enjoyed a “season of heavy rain.” Competitors argued over who had the bigger ad budget. Everyone swelled.
Then drought came to the jungle.
Advertising was the first thing cut to zero. Salaries followed. Then teams. Then all that creative glamour dried up. Only those survived who managed to change their business model in time.
Everyone entered the ritual of transformation. Not everyone came out.
The problem isn’t the rain-and-drought pattern itself. It’s that after long years of abundance, players forget how to reinvent themselves. And incentive systems reward imitation of the known, not creation of the new.
Wise is the leader who draws the katana of transformation at least once a year.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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