What power transitions teach us about category strategy
There is a recurring pattern that appears in politics and in technology companies alike. The leaders who create extraordinary category-dominating success often become victims of that very success – not because they lose their ability or suddenly make poor decisions, but because the strategy that once made them exceptional gradually hardens into orthodoxy.
Success creates confidence, confidence becomes certainty, and eventually certainty becomes dogma. Organisations stop adapting to the world around them and start protecting the formula that made them successful in the first place.
By the time a long-serving leader finally departs, many of the difficult decisions have already been postponed. Their successor doesn’t inherit the conditions that produced success; they inherit the accumulated consequences of avoiding change. That is why so many incoming leaders appear to struggle.
Often, they are trying to solve problems they did not create.
Brilliant strategies
Every great company begins with a strategic insight. Apple reinvented consumer electronics through design-led innovation. Intel dominated computing by combining world-class chip design with world-class manufacturing. Amazon built a retail empire by sacrificing short-term profits to create unmatched scale and customer loyalty. Each strategy was brilliant.
The problem is that brilliant strategies eventually become institutional habits.
Successful leaders naturally become surrounded by people who agree with them. Organisations begin optimising for protecting yesterday’s achievements instead of preparing for tomorrow’s disruption. Painful restructuring is deferred because it would tarnish an otherwise remarkable legacy. Meanwhile, competitors are busy rewriting the rules. The organisation can appear healthy for years, until the market shifts and the consequences of a decade of postponed decisions land all at once.
An impossible dilemma
This leaves the successor facing an almost impossible dilemma. Change too much and they are blamed for disruption. Change too little and they are blamed for decline. Either way, comparisons with their predecessor are inevitable – and almost always unfair. The predecessor is remembered for creating success; the successor is judged on managing its consequences.
It is the organisational equivalent of receiving a `hospital pass`.
Intel illustrates the problem perfectly. For decades its integrated model of designing and manufacturing chips was one of the greatest competitive advantages in technology. Then the industry changed. Manufacturing leadership slipped – competitors embraced outsourced fabrication, and the explosion of artificial intelligence shifted demand towards specialised processors where NVIDIA surged ahead.
Illustrating the problem
By the time Pat Gelsinger returned to restore Intel’s manufacturing leadership, the challenge had become enormous. When outsider Lip-Bu Tan took over in 2025, analysts broadly welcomed the appointment while acknowledging the sheer scale of the task ahead. As one analyst observed, he had “a lot of wood to chop.” Recovery leaders rarely receive credit for reversing years of strategic drift; they simply inherit it.
Apple demonstrates a subtler version of the same pattern. Steve Jobs handed Tim Cook extraordinary technology momentum, and Cook transformed that momentum into one of the most profitable businesses in history through operational excellence few CEOs could match.
Success creates dependencies
Yet success creates dependencies. Apple remains heavily reliant on the iPhone, the pace of creating entirely new product categories has slowed, and questions about artificial intelligence increasingly dominate discussion about the company’s future.
None of this diminishes Cook’s achievements. Rather, it illustrates how difficult reinvention becomes once an organisation is optimised around yesterday’s winning formula. Whoever eventually succeeds Cook – widely expected to be hardware chief John Ternus – will inherit an unenviable brief: maintain Apple’s financial performance, deliver its AI strategy, invent the next platform, and inevitably be compared with both Cook and Steve Jobs.
Jobs, of course, won’t be coming back.
Navigating unprecedented circumstances
Amazon reveals another variation of the same cycle. Andy Jassy inherited a business shaped by extraordinary pandemic-era decisions: excess capacity, slowing cloud growth, pressure to improve profitability and increasing regulatory scrutiny.
Many of these challenges were the inevitable consequence of navigating unprecedented circumstances, yet investors continue to compare him with Jeff Bezos, whose reputation had already become legendary. Every few years rumours emerge suggesting Bezos could return.
They almost certainly won’t materialise, but the rumours themselves reveal something important. People remember founders at their peak. They forget the strategic decisions that gradually made change unavoidable.
The political script
Politics follows much the same script. Margaret Thatcher transformed Britain’s economy, but John Major inherited recession, party divisions and an electorate increasingly ready for change. More recently, Rishi Sunak inherited Brexit implementation, post-pandemic debt, overstretched public services and a deeply divided Conservative Party. Whatever judgement history ultimately reaches about his premiership, his room for manoeuvre was constrained from the outset.
US President, Joe Biden, entered office amid a pandemic, inflation, geopolitical instability and unprecedented political polarisation. Many of those conditions predated his presidency, yet public judgement naturally focused on outcomes rather than origins. Voters, it seems, behave much like shareholders: they judge the incoming leader against memories rather than circumstances.
Collective memory edits reality
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this cycle is what happens next. Collective memory edits reality. We remember confidence, growth and innovation, but we are much less likely to associate today’s problems with yesterday’s strategic assumptions.
As dissatisfaction with the successor grows, nostalgia for the predecessor follows. Politics is full of leaders who look better once they have left office. Technology occasionally does the same, with boards and investors wondering whether the founder should return.
Occasionally they do – but they invariably discover they have returned to solve a completely different problem from the one they originally mastered.
Organisations gradually stop adapting
The lesson is not that long-serving leaders inevitably become ineffective. Many remain exceptional for decades. The danger is that organisations gradually stop adapting to changing markets and begin adapting to the leader instead ensuring category decline.
By the time a successor arrives, gradual evolution is no longer enough. Only painful reform remains. That often makes the successor appear weaker, even when they may be demonstrating greater leadership than the person they replaced.
An uncomfortable conclusion
Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. The best time for a successful category-creating leader to leave is probably before they feel ready. Leaving while the organisation is still healthy gives a successor the freedom to adapt gradually rather than forcing them into crisis management.
Ironically, leaders who stay longest to protect their legacy may end up making it harder to preserve. The greatest leaders are remembered not simply because they built remarkable organisations, but because they understood that no strategy – not even a winning one – lasts forever.