Most Companies Won’t Reach 10 Years
By Tony Bynum, MBA, MDM
December 18, 2025
Most companies don’t make it to their 10th birthday, let alone their 100th. Yet a rare group of organizations, from IBM to Toyota, Unilever to Nintendo, continue to reinvent themselves long after their original founders are gone.
Their longevity isn’t luck. It’s the result of habits, mindsets, and design-driven practices that keep them in sync with customers, culture, and the marketplace.
6 Lessons From Enduring Organizations
Here’s what enduring organizations consistently do differently, and how today’s leaders can apply the same playbook:
A thick cloud of fog rolls through the evergreen forest of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington. A moody foggy portrait landscape of alpine trees on a mountain.
1. Enduring Organizations Avoid Myopic Definitions of Their Business and Who They Serve.
Mindset Required: Think in terms of human needs, not products.
Companies that survive generational shifts define themselves by the problem they solve, not the thing they sell. Nintendo didn’t start out as a video game system (fascinating full story here!)
Design Capability: Problem framing. Great design starts by asking whether we’re even solving the right problem.
Actionable Takeaway: Ask your team, “If our flagship product disappeared tomorrow, what human need would our customers still rely on us for?”
2. Enduring Organizations Stay Future-Oriented by Watching Weak Signals.
Mindset Required: Stay curious about the edges of the market.
Disruption rarely arrives with a press release. It starts as a faint signal, a new behavior among young users, a fringe technology, a shifting cultural value. Longevity companies treat these as clues, not noise.
Design Capability: Deep observation and empathy, paying attention to what people do, not just what they say.
Actionable Takeaway: Dedicate 5% of every strategy meeting to weak-signal sharing. Make it a ritual.
3. Enduring Organizations Manage Innovation Portfolios Like Investors.
Mindset Required: Balance today’s engine with tomorrow’s bets.
Great companies don’t wait for a crisis to innovate. They use a disciplined innovation portfolio, typically the 70/20/10 model: 70% core business, 20% adjacent growth, 10% bold, transformative experiments.
That final 10% often determines whether a company reinvents or retreats.
Design Capability: Parallel prototyping, exploring multiple paths at once.
Actionable Takeaway: If your company’s roadmap is 100% certainty and 0% experimentation, you’re underinvesting in the future.
4. Enduring Organizations Compete by Creating New Value, Not Fighting Old Battles.
Mindset Required: Have the courage to step into uncontested territory.
Blue Ocean Strategy isn’t theory, it’s survival. Long-lasting companies don’t rely on price wars or incremental improvements. They create new demand by solving unmet or invisible needs.
Design Capability: Co-creation and reframing, uncovering latent needs customers can’t yet articulate.
Actionable Takeaway: Identify the biggest industry assumption no one questions. Then challenge it.
5. Enduring Organizations Practice Long-Arch Thinking.
Mindset Required: Invest in decisions that compound over decades.
Short-termism kills companies that look successful on paper but hollow internally. Longevity companies make moves that build trust, culture, and capability, not just quarterly results.
Design Capability: Systems thinking, designing with awareness of long-term, downstream consequences.
Actionable Takeaway: What decision could you make this quarter that your successors will thank you for?
6. Enduring Organizations Build Escape Velocity.
Why It Matters: Most organizations never reach longevity because they fail to break free from the gravitational pull of their past successes.
Companies accumulate processes, metrics, habits, and mental models that made them great, then those same strengths become anchors. Achieving organizational escape velocity means shedding outdated assumptions, redesigning decision pathways, and building the capacity to move faster than the market shifts.
This is where design-led capability becomes a strategic differentiator: it helps organizations question legacy constraints, rapidly prototype new paths, and build the cultural flexibility needed to outrun disruption.
Actionable Takeaway: Identify one “gravity well” in your organization, an outdated process, KPI, or assumption that slows innovation. What would it take to escape its pull?
Dexterity: The Engine of Longevity
Most companies get really good at performing and forget how to transform. Longevity companies have the operational dexterity to do both. They scale efficiently and stay flexible enough to pivot when the world shifts. They don’t just change; they use design to transform. They combine discipline and imagination to combine performance and transformation; they mind the present while shaping the future.
Companies built to last are the ones that know when to sprint, when to adapt, and when to reinvent.
A Question for Today’s Leaders
What would be possible if your team or business were able to meet the needs of today and be responsive to the needs of tomorrow?
The Institute of Design Executive Academy can equip your organization to perform while transforming through work-integrated learning. Establish your company’s staying power through with time-tested methods in problem framing, parallel prototyping, co-creation and reframing, systems thinking, and more.