Much of modern management thinking is built on a narrow and deceptively comforting habit: studying winners and working backward. From a small set of outliers, we extract traits, frameworks, and moral lessons, then present them as generalizable insight.
This habit has consequences.
When winners become the primary dataset, success is treated as evidence of virtue, failure as proof of deficiency, and everything in between as an incomplete attempt at greatness. Scale, endurance, and dominance are elevated into ideals, while realism, adaptation, and constraint are quietly reframed as shortcomings.
This is not merely a bias. It is a form of intellectual tyranny.
It narrows how success is defined, distorts how effort is evaluated, and excludes from serious consideration the far larger population of founders and businesses that operate without illusions of podium finishes. These firms are not chasing category dominance. They are managing risk, allocating capital, employing people, and improving incrementally within real constraints.
Capitalism does not function because of a handful of exceptional companies. It functions because of thousands of founder-led and sponsor-backed firms that survive imperfectly, adapt continuously, and contribute meaningfully without ever “winning” outright.
They are not failed versions of greatness. They are the system.
Winners, Stories, and Selection Bias
Nassim Taleb has spent much of his career warning against what happens when we mistake outcomes for insight. When we study only survivors, we create stories that feel explanatory but are largely retrospective.
We infer discipline from success and deficiency from failure, while ignoring randomness, timing, and structural constraint. The many equally capable firms that did not succeed disappear from the narrative entirely.
Jim Collins’ Good to Great is not wrong—but it is selective. Companies are chosen because they succeeded, and their traits are elevated into prescriptions. What is missing is the full distribution: disciplined, well-run, realistic businesses that never became “great,” yet contributed meaningfully for years.
Taleb would call this narrative fallacy. Founders recognize it as lived reality.
The Marathon, Not the Podium
Most founders are not chasing a podium. They are running a marathon.
They train, they improve their time, they manage their energy, and they adjust their pace to the terrain. They understand their markets, capital constraints, and personal limits. This is not a lack of ambition; it is a form of discipline.
Just as a marathon is not defined by its winner alone, capitalism is not defined by unicorns. It is defined by the middle of the pack—the companies that run steadily, improve year over year, and persist long enough to matter.
Durability Is Not the Same as Value
A central assumption that often emerges from management literature is that longevity—enduring for decades—signals intrinsic greatness, even when the original analysis was more methodologically careful.
That assumption deserves scrutiny.
Endurance can reflect many things:
- Favorable timing
- Regulatory protection
- Market structure
- Access to capital
- Or simple path dependence
It is not always a signal of superior judgment or virtue.
Conversely, a founder who builds a solid business and exits profitably is not abandoning responsibility or falling short of some moral standard. They are participating in one of capitalism’s most important functions: capital reallocation.
A thoughtful exit:
- Takes appropriate risk off the founder’s table
- Rewards early effort and capital
- Transfers the business to owners better suited for the next phase
- Creates space for reinvestment elsewhere in the economy
In many cases, the skills required to found and stabilize a company are not the same skills required to scale, institutionalize, or navigate a changed environment. Treating permanence as the only respectable outcome ignores this reality.
A business that thrives for ten or fifteen years, serves its customers well, employs people responsibly, and exits cleanly has not failed because it did not endure for fifty.
It has completed a successful arc.
Collins Was Right—But Not Only for “Great” Companies
Jim Collins’ insistence on getting the right people on the bus remains one of the most durable insights in Good to Great. But it applies far beyond companies aspiring to multi-decade dominance.
Founder-led and private equity–backed businesses, in particular, depend on having the right people simply to sustain operations while they build, adjust, or prepare for exit:
- Managing cash flow and liquidity
- Navigating funding and capital structure
- Handling taxes, payroll, and regulation
- Translating strategy into operational reality
In these contexts, the question is not “Will we be great for generations?” It is “Do we have the people in place to run this business soundly, now?”
The Foundational Role That Rarely Gets Celebrated
Management literature often celebrates builders and visionaries while overlooking those who choose to support rather than headline.
Yet many of the most valuable contributors in capitalism deliberately remain in foundational roles:
- Specialists who choose depth over scale
- Professionals who bring judgment rather than frameworks
- People who stay engaged rather than offering advice and disappearing
These roles are not transitional. They are essential.
If having the right people on the bus matters, then so does respecting that not everyone needs—or wants—to be driving.
The Myth of the All-Freelance Future
Another assumption woven through modern management thinking is that the traditional model of people working within organizations is obsolete—that the future belongs entirely to free agents and fluid networks.
History and practice suggest otherwise.
Henry Mintzberg has long argued that real work happens through coordination, continuity, and context. Organizations endure not because everyone is autonomous, but because many people choose to commit to shared systems, routines, and responsibilities.
For centuries, economies have depended on a mix of:
- Risk-takers and founders
- Operators and managers
- Skilled contributors who value stability and continuity
This model is not archaic. It is proven—and it remains effective.
Admiration Without Hierarchy
A founder who improves steadily without illusions of grandeur is no less admirable than a rare winner. A professional who chooses to support, stabilize, and enable rather than scale a firm of their own is no less accomplished.
Capitalism depends on both.
When business thinking elevates only scale, endurance, and dominance, it distorts how we value effort, contribution, and success.
A healthier view recognizes that:
- Some build
- Some support
- Some exit
- Some endure
All are necessary.
Closing Thought
Studying winners is seductive. It produces clean narratives, confident prescriptions, and the illusion of control. But it also produces blindness.
By focusing almost exclusively on outliers, management thinking mistakes survival for superiority, endurance for virtue, and scale for value. It treats exits as moral failures, realism as a lack of ambition, and foundational roles as secondary—despite relying on all of them to function.
A healthier understanding of capitalism begins by rejecting this tyranny.
Some build. Some support. Some endure. Some exit. Each plays a necessary role in the same system.
If management literature wants to understand how businesses actually survive and contribute, it needs fewer myths about greatness and more respect for the full distribution of outcomes—not as consolation, but as recognition. The thousands of runners who compete define the race long after the winners crossed the line and beyond the spotlight of the cameras that have moved on to commercials.
Financial Foundations with Jim Curham 
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