Two-thirds of the fastest-growing startups eventually fail.

I grew up spending a lot of time cross-country skiing, a solid Norwegian solitary activity.  I was seldom the fastest sprinter or most technically gifted athlete. But I could often outlast my competitors. After three decades of watching companies rise and fall in the relentless tide of technological change, I've learned that business success follows a similar pattern—it's not about the sprint, it's about strategic endurance.

While everyone obsesses over "move fast and break things," the companies that truly endure take a different approach. Whether building from day one or navigating disruption, they develop systematic capabilities that help them not just survive change, but emerge stronger from it.

This led me to develop the ENDURE framework, or rather, mnemonic - the world doesn't really need another framework. ENDURE helps me remember six dimensions that explain how organizations create lasting competitive advantages while driving breakthrough innovation. This isn't an academic theory; it's my way of encapsulating what I've learned over the past 30+ years of helping companies thrive. 

The ENDURE "Framework"

Environmental Exploration
Network Orchestration
Disruptive Experimentation
Unmet Needs Insight
Resilience
Elasticity

Environmental Exploration: The Meerkat's Vigil

Picture a meerkat rising on its hind legs, scanning the horizon. This creature's survival depends on perceiving subtle shifts and emergent threats—exactly what successful businesses must do today.

Environmental scanning isn't passive monitoring; it's constant, collective vigilance where every team member becomes a sentry for change and opportunity.

Netflix exemplifies masterful environmental scanning through their systematic recognition of technological tipping points. When Reed Hastings launched streaming in 2007, most companies were still focused on physical media. Netflix recognized that broadband penetration was reaching the critical threshold for streaming adoption—a pattern that competitors missed for years.

Their environmental scanning capabilities showed during COVID-19, when Netflix immediately recognized the shift toward digital entertainment consumption. As Hastings noted, they witnessed "2 years of digital transformation in 2 months." This wasn't luck—it was systematic monitoring of technological and social forces reshaping media consumption.

Network Orchestration: The Power of Liquid Networks

Innovation seldom emerges in isolation. The most enduring companies act as catalysts, consciously convening diverse minds where ideas percolate and hunches collide until breakthroughs materialize.

3M has mastered network orchestration through systematic cross-pollination across their vast technology portfolio. Rather than innovating within isolated business units, 3M deliberately shares technologies across 60,000+ products spanning everything from Post-it Notes to medical devices to aerospace applications.

Their adhesive technology exemplifies this perfectly—the same core science appears in consumer products, industrial applications, and medical devices. By orchestrating knowledge networks across divisions, 3M creates innovations that no single business unit could develop alone. This cross-pollination approach enables them to maintain 30% of sales from products introduced in the past four years across diverse markets.

Great organizations understand that their competitive advantage lies not in what they control, but in what they can orchestrate.

Disruptive Experimentation: Systematic Digging

Just as meerkats dig and probe beneath the surface to discover food and safe burrows for sleeping, enduring companies are relentless experimenters. But this isn't about reckless risk—it's about systematic "digging" through prototyping, pilots, and challenging legacy assumptions.

Amazon's systematic business model experimentation exemplifies disruptive experimentation. Jeff Bezos didn't just choose books randomly—he systematically tested whether unlimited catalog advantages could overcome the trust and convenience advantages of physical retail.

Starting with books was a deliberate experiment: they had the largest catalog potential (1.5 million English titles versus typical bookstore's 100,000), standardized products that reduced quality concerns, and established customer expectations for mail-order delivery. Once this experiment proved the model, Amazon methodically experimented with expansion into new categories—each requiring different logistics, customer education, and trust-building approaches.

This systematic approach to business model experimentation enabled Amazon to challenge fundamental retail assumptions and create entirely new market possibilities, growing from garage startup to $1.6 trillion valuation.

The companies that endure don't just adapt to disruption—they create it through disciplined experimentation.

Unmet Needs Insight: From Features to Human Insights

Rather than hunting for "blue oceans," the imperative is uncovering unspoken pains and aspirations that incumbents overlook. Today's AI-powered research platforms like Outset.ai enable organizations to conduct ethnographic research at unprecedented scale, surfacing nuanced human insights.

Stripe's breakthrough came from understanding developers' real pain point. The Collison brothers recognized that the challenge wasn't payment processing complexity—it was implementation complexity. Their insight that developers wanted "seven lines of code" to handle payments addressed an unmet need that traditional payment companies missed.

This developer-first approach enabled Stripe to scale from individual programmers to enterprise teams using the same elegant API. By focusing on the unspoken frustration of implementation rather than the obvious need for payment processing, they created a platform that now processes hundreds of billions annually.

Stripe shows how the most valuable insights come from observing what people struggle with, not just what they say they want.

Resilience: The Growth Mindset Organization

Resilience isn't about bouncing back—it's about learning, adapting, and emerging stronger. Companies with corporate growth mindsets view setbacks as data, not failures.

Microsoft's transformation under Satya Nadella perfectly exemplifies resilience building. When Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft was struggling with mobile computing and cloud transitions. Rather than defending legacy businesses, he embraced a growth mindset culture that viewed challenges as learning opportunities.

The company shifted from proprietary to open-source technologies, from competing to collaborating, from know-it-all to learn-it-all mentality. This resilience-building approach enabled Microsoft to become a trillion-dollar company and dominate cloud computing through Azure.

Resilient organizations don't just survive disruption—they use it as fuel for transformation.

Elasticity: Knowledge Flow as Lifeblood

Enduring organizations recognize that static knowledge leads to stagnation. Instead, they design for knowledge flow—intentionally shaping how insights, expertise, and feedback circulate internally and externally.

Toyota exemplifies evolution enablement through their systematic kaizen approach to continuous improvement. Every employee—from executives to assembly workers—participates in knowledge flow, generating thousands of implemented suggestions annually.

This isn't just suggestion boxes; it's systematic optimization of how insights move through the organization. When supply chain disruptions hit, Toyota's knowledge flow systems enabled rapid adaptation while maintaining quality leadership. Their Production System demonstrates how effective knowledge circulation creates antifragile organizations that strengthen under stress.

Toyota shows that evolution enablement isn't about collecting knowledge—it's about designing systems where insights flow, combine, and create continuous organizational learning.

The Integration Challenge

Here's what I've learned: these six dimensions work in concert. Environmental scanning without experimentation leads to analysis paralysis. Network orchestration without unmet needs insights creates elaborate solutions to non-problems. Resilience without elasticity becomes mere stubbornness.

The companies that truly endure master all six dimensions, using them as a comprehensive approach to strategic thinking rather than a checklist to complete. The challenge, as always, is that the right answer for each dimension requires deep understanding of the tools, techniques, and methods that match your specific context—not blindly copying some "best practice" from the latest business book. Experience, humility, and trusting your own "slow hunch" pay dividends here.

What This Means for You

If you're building a company or leading transformation, consider these questions:

• Environmental Exploration: Who in your organization acts as sentries for change? How do you systematically monitor shifts in technology, regulation, and customer behavior?

• Network Orchestration: What diverse networks are you tapping into? How do you create "liquid networks" where ideas can collide and combine?

• Disruptive Experimentation: Are you systematically challenging your assumptions? What impossible things are you experimenting with? And are you experimenting to learn or prove you're right? The latter seldom works.

• Unmet Needs Insight: Are you observing what customers struggle with, not just what they say they want? And have your customers become resigned to accepting a situation because no one has ever questioned it?

• Resilience: Does your culture view setbacks as learning opportunities? How do you institutionalize growth mindset?

• Elasticity: How does knowledge flow through your organization? Are you optimizing for learning or hoarding?

After 30+ years in innovation, I'm convinced that enduring advantage doesn't come from moving faster—it comes from moving more strategically across all these dimensions, trusting your intuition and being willing to test and learn.

What dimension of ENDURE is strongest in your organization? Which needs the most attention?