The Innovation Show

“How did you go bankrupt?” asks one character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” (via Paul Nunes, in “Big Bang Disruption”)

That sentence explains so many collapses in life: waistlines, empires, reputations. One biscuit at a time. One skipped workout. One more justification.

I experienced this firsthand when I first had kids with a creeping dad bod. Even thought I was a professional athlete, the creep snuck in as I moved into “the real world”. It wasn’t a Big Mac and a vow to abandon health. It was much imperceptible. One uneaten chicken nugget off my kid’s plate. A handful of chips while tidying after a birthday party. An indulgent pastry at a work event. No single choice made the difference, but together, they nudged me across an invisible threshold. Gradually, then suddenly.

“Weight gain often occurs gradually over decades (about 1 lb per year), making it difficult for most people to perceive the specific causes.” — Authors of this research study

Researchers have found that as little as 100 extra calories per day — the equivalent of a biscuit, or just one chicken nugget — can quietly lead to 5–10kg of weight gain over a few years. These are imperceptible surpluses, hidden beneath the noise of daily life. They don’t tip scales or trigger panic. Instead, they linger beneath the surface, accumulating quietly, day by day.

This is what public health experts call “creeping obesity”. You don’t gain 10kg in a weekend. You gain it by ignoring the little things. You gain it with rationalisations. “It’s only Thursday.” “I’ll start again Monday.”

Turning the Tide — Small Changes, Big Impact

“Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.” — Rudiger Dornbusch, economist

Just as the surplus adds up, so too can a small daily deficit. In fact, research shows that a 100–200 calorie reduction per day — eating slightly less, walking a bit more — can reverse the trend. You don’t need a juice cleanse or bootcamp. Just consistency. Over time, small wins build momentum. You tighten one belt loop, then another. Confidence returns.

You lose weight the same way you gained it: gradually, then suddenly.

The same creeping complacency (or discipline) that undermines our bodies can quietly unravel even the mightiest of companies.

The Corporate Calories of Organisational Decline

“One theme common to all failures is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.” — Clayton Christensen

Businesses don’t usually collapse because of one foolish CEO or one disastrous launch. They decline the way people gain weight: a few bad habits, unchecked. A little too much comfort. A failure to be mindful and take notice or worse a failure to take action when you do.

As the work of Joe Bower and his protégés like Clark Gilbert and Robert Alexander Burgelman reveal, the real issue isn’t only the bad decisions, but the invisible processes behind them.

Bower’s crucial insight, If you want to understand a company’s true strategy, don’t read its mission statement. Watch where it allocates its resources. Not once, but over time. Strategy is not an event. It’s a process. Not what the CEO says on stage, but what corporate teams fund, prioritise, pay attention to and reward (or punish) over phone calls, in meeting rooms and budget reviews.

Clark Gilbert took this further in our latest episode of The Innovation Show : “Strategy is embedded deep in the organisation. It’s multi-level. It plays out over time. And roles are inevitably in conflict.”

It’s not one big moment that defines you. It’s the compounding effect of daily choices — a biscuit in business terms.

The Tin Man Test: Rusted by Rigidity

There’s a moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy finds the Tin Man, rusted solid in the woods.

Dorothy: How did you ever get like this?

Tin Man: Well, about a year ago, I was chopping that tree, minding my own business, when it started to rain… and I rusted solid.

Historians suggest the Tin Man represented the American industrial worker during the Great Depression. Factories shut down. People froze in place (Ai may do the same?).

But perhaps there is another metaphor here: a rusting organisation?

Exercise physiologists say, motion is lotion. Joints need movement to stay healthy, you use it or lose it. The same goes for companies. When an organisation stops innovating, questioning itself, reinventing, reallocating resources — it rusts. No oil in the joints. No tension between old and new opportunities. No strategic stretch or flexibility. Ultimately, no growth.

That’s how giants fall. Gradually, then suddenly.

The Parable of the Eleventh Floor

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller

On our recent episode of The Innovation Show, Clark Gilbert shared “The Parable of the Eleventh Floor.” When he took over Deseret Media, he faced the trap of trying to innovate through a system built for the past. Legacy sales teams were still focused on selling full-page print ads to a handful of big advertisers. Digital products, with smaller margins and thousands of potential buyers, didn’t fit their model — or their commission structure.

It wasn’t that they were stubborn. It’s that they were logical — within the wrong context.

One day, Gilbert and his head of print sales met with the CEO of a major car dealership. The dealership had paused all ad spending but was ready to restart. The sales leader pitched a full campaign and asked which agency to coordinate with.

Somewhat bemused, the CEO replied:

“TV and print you can coordinate down here. But for digital, you’ll need to go through our digital team. They’re on the eleventh floor!”

Nothing unusual there, especially in the early noughties. The problem was that Clark’s sales lead had never even heard of the eleventh floor!

But as Clark said, you can be sure that companies like Autotrader.com knew exactly where it was.

That moment became a parable inside Deseret Media. The Eleventh Floor was no longer a physical space. It was symbolic of a different world, a different buyer, and a different strategy, a different context. It highlighted a truth Gilbert made into a mantra: “A digital buyer needs a digital seller.”

He knew then that trying to retrofit digital into a legacy system was a fool’s errand (what Clay Christensen called Cramming). The solution wasn’t better training or more incentives. It was a new system, a new salesforce and ultimately a new context.

And when he pulled responsibility for digital away from the old structure growth doubled. Even then, the former leader of the legacy team insisted it was a mistake, right until his retirement. Years later, even as digital sales surpassed print, the traditional sales lead remained convinced. (Planck’s Priniciple)

As Clark reflected, “Not only did we threaten his leadership, he thought we were doing something bad for the company. Even today as digital sales now exceed sales in the traditional business, he still believes we were wrong. It’s almost impossible to overestimate the persistence of this world view.”

And that’s the key insight: You can’t retrofit your way to the future. You have to create a new context where the resource allocation process values the new. As Einstein put it “You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.”

That’s the organisational chicken nugget. Not noticed. Not challenged. Crammed in, until one day, you’re rusted stiff.

How Gravity Wins (Unless You Intervene)

“Good and evil increase at compound interest. That’s why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance. the smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may go on to victories you never dreamed of.” — C.S. Lewis

In our series with Gary Hamel, Gary shared that there are three invisible forces that flatten the arc of success in organisations over time:

• The Law of Large Numbers: It’s harder to grow a $40 billion company than a $4 million one. Big systems resist change.
• The Law of Averages: Over time, all performance reverts to the mean. You can’t be a high-growth company forever.
• The Law of Diminishing Returns: What once worked wonders delivers less over time. More effort, smaller reward.

These forces act silently. That’s why vigilance matters.

But how do you fight gravity?

• Break big units into small, agile ones.
• Reallocate resources constantly. Don’t reward what used to work.
• Set bold targets that force fresh thinking.
• Create new contexts for new ideas to grow.

Gilbert’s experience leading BYU’s online university was a masterclass in fighting gravity. Traditional faculty resisted certificate-based learning. Using his lessons from Deseret, he didn’t fight them, but rather he created a parallel system where certificate-first education was the priority. Under a new context, the new strategy to thrive.

Sometimes, as he puts it, “You don’t change the people. You change the system.”

The Final Biscuit

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events.” — Robert F. Kennedy

Whether we’re talking about our bodies or our businesses, big shifts rarely happen all at once. They accumulate. A biscuit here. A spreadsheet tweak there. A sales rep steering a client toward the old product. A cognitive or strategic dissonance over there. A CEO rationalising a continued decline in sales.

If there’s hope in this, it’s this: we can intervene at any time. We can change our direction. One rep at a time. One budget line at a time. One bite at a time. Or not as the case may be!

Perhaps most importantly, we can create new systems where good decisions make sense.

Strategy isn’t what you write down. It’s what you repeatedly fund. Leadership isn’t what you say. It’s the context you build.

Gradually, then suddenly.

That episode with Clark Gilbert, up next in this series is 3 episodes with Robert Burgelmann.

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Corporate Weight Gain: Small Choices, Big Consequences was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.