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It’s Only Common Sense: We Have Met the Enemy, and It’s Us

I’ve always loved the line from Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” No one has ever spoken truer words in business. Many businesses fail not because of rivals, but because of complacency, pride, and arrogance that success can bring. The most dangerous rival you’ll face isn’t across the street or overseas; it’s in your conference room.

Success is the most seductive drug in business. It feels wonderful, and it makes you stupid. When everything’s working, people stop asking questions, experimenting, and worrying about the customer because they believe they are the customer. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years,” they say, as if longevity equals immunity from change. But the moment you stop being curious, you become irrelevant. Companies that die succeed slowly, comfortably, and predictably until one day the market moves and they don’t. They’re still polishing their trophies while their customers move on to someone hungrier. Curiosity keeps a company alive; arrogance buries it.

You can spot a company in decline by the time it spends fighting itself. Meetings become turf wars, ideas are strangled because they didn’t come from the “right” department, and the goal shifts from winning customers to winning arguments. Meanwhile, your competitors are eating your lunch. While you’re debating whose logo should go on the PowerPoint, they’re showing customers new ways to solve real problems.

Internal politics are worse than external threats because they turn your people into obstacles. Innovation dies from a lack of permission, and good people stop speaking up because they’ve learned that change is punished and comfort is rewarded. Your biggest competitor is not the company down the road; it’s the meeting you sat through which everyone agreed to “circle back” instead of deciding.

The best leaders I’ve met share this quality: they are perpetually uncomfortable—not in a neurotic, sleepless way, but in a driven, restless way. They know the second they coast, gravity takes over. If you’re in a leadership position, you owe it to your team to challenge the comfort. Ask the hard questions. Walk the floor. Visit customers unannounced. Sit in on design reviews. Listen to the complaints instead of brushing them away. When you feel “we’ve got this,” that’s the time to worry. Declare war on your comfort zone before the market does. Customers don’t care how long you’ve been in business; they care about how you’re solving their problems today. Leaders who build lasting companies never relax into success. They treat it as a temporary state—a momentary win in a long battle against complacency. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove correctly titled his book Only the Paranoid Survive. The healthiest companies I know live in a constant state of productive paranoia. They assume someone, somewhere, is working to beat them, and they’re probably right.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about being alert and refusing to let comfort lull you into thinking you’re safe. Excellent companies don’t spend their time talking about how good they are but figuring out how to stay on top when everything changes. They don’t become complacent when they win a contract; they ask, “What’s next?” They don’t celebrate quarterly results for a week; they celebrate for an hour, then go back to work. They don’t fall in love with their current process; they fall in love with pursuing a better one. Remaining paranoid means being awake. No company ever says, “We willbe complacent this year.” It starts quietly. Someone says, “We’re doing fine.” Sales are steady, margins are good, and customers aren’t complaining too loudly. Everything seems fine, but that’s when the rot sets in. “Fine” is business-speak for “we’ve stopped growing.” It’s the lull before the decline. Formerly dominant brands that have since faded away, like Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Sears, at one point said, “We’re doing fine.” They thought stability was safety, but it’s stagnation in disguise. The world doesn’t stand still, and if you do, you’re already behind. A company that’s “doing fine” today is setting itself up for panic tomorrow.

We love to blame external forces when things go wrong—the market, the economy, the competition, the government, the pandemic, or the algorithm. However, these things only expose existing weaknesses. The real enemy is internal. People stop asking questions, leaders stop listening, the focus shifts to maintaining, and fear replaces drive. Walk through a company that’s lost its spark. You’ll feel it. Old awards adorn the walls, excuses abound in meetings, and sales calls are defensive. Nobody’s asking, “What’s next?” because nobody wants the answer, and the tragedy is, they did it to themselves.

The antidote to internal decline is to reintroduce discomfort. You must rebuild the muscle of curiosity, accountability, and urgency. Ask:

• What would we do if we were starting this company today?
• What would we change if we weren’t afraid of breaking what’s working?
• Who in our company is challenging us, and who have we silenced because they make us uncomfortable?

Hire hungry people who ask “why?” Promote those who make you rethink your assumptions, and reward risk-takers. Make it safe to tell the ugly truth, because the sooner you face reality, the sooner you can fix it. Comfort is the enemy of progress. Growth always requires discomfort, and a little paranoia helps. If your company feels safe, stable, and predictable, you’re on thin ice. Companies that survive must be restless, curious, and uncomfortable enough to keep earning their success every day.

We have met the enemy, and it’s us. That’s good news, because if the problem is internal, so is the solution. 

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.