Strategic Atrophy: The Killer App Killer...
(And Why You're Too Busy to Notice)
My good friend and former podcast co-host Cory Smith recently used a quote in a post that made me think - Mark Twain is said to have said… "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." He might as well have been talking about the slow, comfortable death of marketing instincts in companies that mistake momentum for progress.
As a fractional CMO, I move between start-ups, scaleups, and legacy brands. That unique vantage point isn't just "variety"; it's a diagnostic lens. I see patterns of decay that are invisible to the teams trapped in their daily grind, their heads buried so deep in operations they don’t have time to consider the impact of trends that will… absolutely will… disrupt the business.
I call it strategic atrophy, and it's everywhere. Thriving in the shadows of your quarterly wins, feeding on your operational tunnel vision, growing fat on your refusal to look up from the dashboard long enough to see what's actually happening.
The Founder Who Was ‘Forged in Fire’ in 2015.
It’s hard to keep adapting. And why should you? The most enduring living thing, the shark, hasn’t changed its physiology in 450 million years, but it does have a strategy for longevity - keep moving. You know the way your industry works. Right? You might have built something brilliant once, or maybe your experience has led you to your current idea, a breakthrough moment: the product clicks, the metrics bear it out, and everyone says you are an innovator. Congratulations. Now you're stuck there, frozen in that moment like a bug in amber.
You're still operating like it's the week after your breakthrough, convinced that shipping faster is the ultimate competitive advantage. Meanwhile, your customers stopped caring about your feature velocity two years ago. They're buying a new fad now, or benefits, not functionality. They want to know what you stand for, not how many APIs you can cobble together to resemble a product.
That 40% growth rate feels pretty good, doesn't it? Nothing like a sugar rush to mask the fact that your brand is held together with social-buzz duct tape and founder charisma. When the category matures, and it will, you'll discover that nobody can explain why your company should exist beyond "we do X but better."
And then it will be too late.
The ‘Digital’ Marketer Who Peaked When Facebook Did.
It’s not just founders who find themselves caught in the gaze of their own personal Medusa-like stack. Marketers who built their careers during the platform advertising boom and never learned how to do anything else, or who are bedazzled by Instagram influencers find it hard to move on.
They can optimize a funnel to death but can’t craft a compelling narrative, even if their equity depends on it. Everything's "data-driven," everything's "best practice," everything disappears into the same beige void of corporate messaging.
These are the people celebrating AI as the ultimate efficiency tool, completely missing the point that great marketing requires human judgment, risk-taking, and the willingness to be wrong about something important. They've automated their way into irrelevance and called it innovation.
Here's the truth they don't want to hear: if you never fail spectacularly, you never discover anything interesting. Every "safe" piece of content is a step toward invisibility. Every obvious winner is a vote for mediocrity.
You want to know why your brand has no personality? Because you've optimized the personality out of it. Ask your favourite AI why it defaults to mediocre and it will tell you in a moment of self aware clarity that it’s what you want it to do.
The Symptoms You're Ignoring
Strategic atrophy doesn't announce itself. It wraps itself around the trunk of your business model and sucks the nutrients out in the name of efficiency and stability, slowly strangling your competitive edge.
Check yourself:
When did you last have a conversation that fundamentally changed how you think about your business? When did you last admit you might be wrong?
When did you last make a decision that genuinely scared you?
When did you last talk to a prospect who chose your competitor and really listened to why?
When did you last create something that made some people love you and others hate you?
If you're struggling to answer these questions, congratulations. You've successfully optimized your way into strategic mediocrity. Your processes are humming, your team is aligned, and you're slowly becoming irrelevant.
If your job feels a bit too easy right now, that’s not a badge of honour. It might be the first sign that your edge is dulling. So get out of your lane. Pick a fight with your own assumptions. Stretch something. Break something. Or at the very least, ask yourself when you last learned something from someone who doesn’t look or think like you.
The most cruel part? You won't notice until it's over. Growth masks everything. Success is the most dangerous drug because it convinces you that you're still sharp when you haven't taken a real intellectual risk in years.
The Cure for Comfort
Want to fix this? Stop being so lazy.
Seek out conversations where you feel genuinely stupid. Seek out content that makes your current approach look naïve. Get reverse-mentored by someone who thinks your "proven methods" are relics. Put yourself in rooms where your expertise doesn't matter.
Build friction into your decision-making. Demand dissent. Create space for weird ideas and beautiful failures. You don't build muscle by lifting feathers, and you don't build strategic thinking by avoiding intellectual discomfort.
Stop celebrating the absence of problems as evidence of success. "Nothing's broken" isn't the same as "everything's working." Your comfortable systems might be perfectly optimized for yesterday's game while tomorrow's competition is rewriting the rules.
The best operators I know aren't just experienced, they're intellectually restless. They'd rather crash and burn testing a bold hypothesis than coast on a tired playbook. They understand that edge comes from the willingness to be profoundly wrong about something important.
If your job feels easy, that's not mastery. That's atrophy wearing a disguise.
The Twain Ultimatum
Mark Twain also wrote: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour."
What bold move are you avoiding? What uncomfortable truth are you dancing around? What sacred assumption are you afraid to challenge? What conversation are you postponing because it might reveal that your current approach isn't as brilliant as you thought?
Strategic atrophy kills more companies than dramatic failures ever will. It's death by a thousand safe decisions, the slow fade into irrelevance, the comfortable slide toward "what we've always done."
Your competitors aren't just building better products. They're building better stories, clearer points of view, stronger reasons to exist. While you're optimizing conversion rates, they're converting hearts and minds.
Would it be redundant to talk about how a Fractional CMO might help with this problem? I travel physically and through ideas, so you don’t have to…
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