The Burden of Past Wins Every great company carries a hidden weight: the strategies that used to work. You still see them. In hiring loops that reward old traits. In pitch decks stuck to past positioning. In metrics that describe a business you no longer run. The plays that built your dominance are now protecting your blind spots. They stay unquestioned, not for what they do now but for what they once delivered. Over time, they become embedded. In dashboards. In OKRs. In comp plans and cultural defaults. And once embedded, they start shaping how new information gets interpreted. Then the truth gets filtered through yesterday’s lens. The more successful the company, the harder these defaults are to challenge. Especially when the people defending them are also the ones who helped build the business. Market shifts test your company. Past wins test your willingness to change. When was the last time you audited what you’ve kept, simply because it worked once? Most companies don’t collapse. They just overstay the strategy that already stopped working.

It was great catching up with Todd Murphy, the President of Truescope for North America. Todd has decades of experience in media and communications. His father, Jim Murphy, was a General in the Nebraska National Guard with 36 years of service.