The Most Important Challenge for Successful Companies—Rasmus Ankersen—GLS 2018 Faculty Spotlight

What’s the secret to success? As leaders, we want to know how winning organizations achieve it and continue to remain on top.

We’re excited to announce that Rasmus Ankersen will be joining the 2018 GLS faculty to help us understand how successful organizations can continue to grow and remain successful. Take a look at the short video to learn more.

Do you remember the Nokia 3310? It was once recognized as the greatest phone ever produced. This was back in the days when people didn’t buy a mobile phone. They bought a Nokia.

But today the Nokia 3310 rests in peace in the gadget graveyard, and it’s become a reminder to all of us that it is much harder for a company to remain successful than it is to become successful.

Nokia went from owning 50% of the global market to 3% in less than 5 years. And when people try to explain how Nokia fell so far so fast, usually the iPhone takes the center stage.

But I don’t believe Apple killed Nokia. I believe that Nokia killed Nokia. Decades of success had created a complacent culture that blocked Nokia from reacting quickly enough, until it was too late.

And this is the point I’m trying to make: When companies become successful, they don’t fight just their competitors anymore. More than anything they fight themselves, and they fight human nature.

To beat human nature, you have to act counter-intuitively. So, when the results are better than ever, you have to ask increasingly skeptical questions. When no one thinks there is a need to change, it’s the right time to drive change.

When you’re number one in your industry, you have to act and think as if you’re number two. This is the paradoxical nature of creating Hunger in Paradise, and it is the single most important and most difficult management challenge for successful companies.

Rasmus Ankersen is an expert on performance development and a trusted advisor to businesses and athletes worldwide. He is chairman of FC Midtjylland in Denmark and director of Brentford FC in England, two of the world’s most innovative football clubs, recognized for using big data to drive decision-making. Ankersen’s recent book, Hunger in Paradise, tells how organizations can remain successful by eliminating complacency.