BRANDS
Humility Of The
Brand
By Enock Wandera
T
his month, I spent some hours
reading Ryan Holiday’s book ‘Ego
is the enemy’. As I went through
the second part, success, I was fascinated
by the points he lists as considerations
for managing the ego when experiencing
great success. He notes how when we
approach the top of the mountain with
the summit in sight, new temptations
and new problems emerge, the air gets
thinner, the environment becomes tough
and unforgiving. At that peak of success,
we stop listening for learning and become
victims of ourselves and competition as
sobriety and open mindedness become less
and less.
From a brand or business perspective,
there are several points of reflection that
I picked but first was whether brands or
businesses have ego issues as well - as
enemy of further or sustained growth. Let
me follow this with an examination of
some interesting points by Ryan on how
the ego can restrain the success achieved
by an individual - and in my view, the
points are very applicable to a brand or a
business - thus follows my point of view.
The first question is whether a business, a
brand or by extension, teams in the whole
organization yearn for learning or not
(whether they remain as students even
when successful) - in other words, the
extent to which the entire organization is
open minded and is ready to learn instead
of staying intoxicated by the success
achieved so far. After big success such as
acquisition of great revenue, profitability,
chances are that the ego will say ‘We are
special, we are better, the rules don’t apply
to us’.
As businesses and brands grow in success
and knowledge, so does the temptation
to stop learning new practices, new ideas
- until disaster strikes in the form of a
disruption - at some point in time, every
industry will be disrupted by some trend or
innovation that despite all the resources in
When basking under success, there is tempta-
tion, especially from the leadership, to have
control of everything and fail to delegate ef-
fectively - and, to appropriate all the credit
to themselves (ego in control). This suffo-
cates the opportunities for growth instead
and creates a very chaotic environment that
limits decision making. In the current busi-
ness world, we all know that fast decision
making is one of the components of agility
- key for growth.
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the world, the incumbent interests will be
incapable of responding to - because of the
lost ability to learn - from new situations,
new customer needs, new conventional
and unconventional competition.
The business world is full of examples -
most familiar ones are Nokia vs. Samsung,
Kodak’s decline during the digital
disruption. I am sure we can think of
our own examples within our businesses.
Amidst the prevailing brand success,
keep listening to customers, maintain a
pragmatic cycle of learning, adaptation
and constant revision of strategy to take
advantage of arising opportunities. That’s
humility.
The second point is around avoiding the
inward-looking habit of telling yourself
a story but instead, focus on embedding
standards of performance, instilling
excellence and routines that help deliver
excellence. There is always big temptation
to get into the hubris of success as Jim
Collins, the writer of the great business
read ‘How the Mighty Fall’ calls it - many
would agree that once in that space and
with excessive talk about the success,
misplaced haughtiness sets in easily.
Sometime last year, I crafted a phrase for
this - I called it ‘building a shrine of success
and dancing around it’. The shrine in this
case could be a huge project won, the just
achieved double-digit growth that has
been illusive for years, impressive return
on shareholders’ equity, initial success of a
new launch and so on and so forth.
The idea is to start with small ideas that
can be built into bigger ideas in the years