Success is a Habit

In a rapidly changing economy, consistency and adaptability are now competitive edges. Markets move fast, consumer expectations evolve even faster, and organizations that rely on luck or one-time wins rarely sustain success. Habits determine momentum, and momentum drives potential. Decoding how to create enduring, positively reinforcing business habits is the foundation of operational excellence—and it separates industry leaders from those left behind.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Aristotle’s words of two millennia ago remain inspiring, but what are the habits that drive success in business? How can singular acts add up to positive momentum?

Inertia in business can be a force for either growth or decline, while entropy is the gradual slide into inefficiency, disorder, and even irrelevance. The right combination of enduring practices (habits) and purposeful interventions (acts)—especially a commitment to social and environmental impact—can stave off the creeping effects of entropy, becoming a powerful engine for sustainable success.

Using Inertia to Drive Success

You’ve likely experienced periods of exciting, positive momentum in your work. It’s true at a personal level, but it can be incredibly powerful when it reaches across the whole organization. Simply put, inertia is the tendency for established routines, processes, and attitudes to persist over time. 

Inertia can evoke warnings about resistance to change (think Blockbuster’s missed pivot to streaming), but it can also mean the preservation of productive habits that drive organizational momentum. Toyota’s long-standing Kaizen (continuous improvement) practices have created a culture of lasting operational excellence, compounding innovation over decades. 

Positive inertia keeps high-functioning teams moving forward along constructive paths, automating excellence and compounding small wins into big outcomes.

Enduring business success hinges on cultivating the right rhythms and routines:

• Practising Continuous Improvement: Companies that embed learning and feedback into daily operations gain positive momentum from incremental improvement (Check out Lean, Six Sigma and Agile project management approaches).
• Building a Values-Driven Culture: A clear company mission—and better yet, a purpose beyond profit—anchors decisions and helps everyone maintain focus when market conditions shift.
• Developing Each Employee: Structured training and development pathways support operational excellence and help teams adapt to change, maintaining positive momentum.
• Allowing Standards to Flex: Established processes are essential for efficiency, but successful organizations pair these with the capacity to adapt when conditions change, balancing order and responsiveness.
• Ensuring Transparent Communication: Open communication builds trust, aligns teams, and protects inertia from erosion.

Resisting Entropy to Maintain Momentum

Entropy is the natural drift toward disorganization and inefficiency. In businesses, entropy may be driven by outdated technology, inconsistent processes, multiplying exceptions, or rising error rates—all leading to wasted time, increased costs, and declining results.

Unlike inertia (which can sometimes be positive), entropy is always a threat to long-term sustainability and competitive edge. Leaders must regularly intervene to course-correct and refocus the organization:

• Audit and Streamline Processes: Regular review and simplification of workflows counteracts gradual disorder.
• Consider Technology Upgrades: Regularly updating systems and retiring legacy IT keeps complexity and inefficiency at bay.
• Involve Employees: Gathering feedback and developing a culture of continuous improvement keeps entropy in check, because problems are identified and addressed as early as possible.
• Drive to Standardize: Clear policies and standardized tools reduce variability and disorder, making it easier to maintain quality at scale.
• Ensure Regular Training: Ensuring teams are continually upskilled counters obsolescence and aligns everyone with new processes. 
• Clarify Metrics for Accountability: Tracking performance and tying it to organizational goals helps leaders find and fix entropy hot spots before they take root.

Accelerating Inertia with Positive Impact

A strong commitment to social and environmental goals is both a safeguard against entropy and a generator of positive inertia. Purpose-driven companies—those with a meaningful, strategic commitment to social and environmental wellbeing—earn deeper trust from customers, partners, and employees, which translates to resilience and market differentiation. They also attract and retain talent. Workers increasingly value meaning in their work, so purpose-driven companies attract them and keep them engaged, reinforcing positive cultural inertia.

Ambitious social or environmental goals also stimulate new ways of thinking, breaking negative inertia and enhancing adaptation for growth.

Companies that support their communities feed into a virtuous cycle: vibrant local economies and healthy environments create stronger customer bases and richer pools of collaborators. And social responsibility tightens alignment and accountability throughout the company, reinforcing good habits and creating a buffer against disorder when external shocks occur.

How Can You Make Excellence a Habit?

Here are four acts you can take to set the foundation for habits of excellence:

First, set a clear purpose: Engage your people in the process of defining your organization’s social purpose. It’s a powerful intervention that can arrest entropy, unify your team, and help ensure employees and leaders are more likely to reinforce positive routines.

Next, embed purpose and impact across operations: Aligning strategy, culture, and brand around a genuine, positive social purpose will drive consistent decision-making, embedding positive inertia throughout the organization.

Measure progress and learn from the insights: Using clear metrics (for both performance and impact) and sharing progress openly builds accountability and embeds learning, further driving constructive inertia.

Collaborate continuously: Engaging in networks and partnerships (including and especially those that advance social good) exposes the organization to new ideas and standards, keeping entropy from setting in. And after all, any purpose worth achieving is likely to be so ambitious that you can’t achieve it alone.

The difference between thriving and failing often lies in how organizations harness positive inertia and defend against the corrosive effects of entropy. Purpose, aligned routines, ongoing refinement, and a deep-seated commitment to learning and collaboration are proven engines for personal and organizational resilience, competitive edge, and long-term success.

Struggling with negative inertia or entropy? We’re making dramatic breakthroughs with our clients, even in these trying times. Contact us to learn more.