Leadership Isn’t Found In The Past — It’s Discovered In Building The Path Forward And Is Forged Right Here In The Now!
In Only the Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove describes the moment Intel nearly lost everything.
The company had dominated memory chips for years. That success became their identity.
Past wins shaped how leaders thought.
Past scars shaped how leaders reacted.
But competitors caught up. Margins collapsed.
The old playbook stopped working.
Grove and his team didn’t lack experience.
They had too much of it.
The danger wasn’t ignorance.
It was loyalty to the past.
One day, Grove famously asked his team:
“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would they do?”
The answer was obvious.
Exit the memory business. Focus on microprocessors.
So Grove made the hardest leadership move of his career — he acted like the future mattered more than his history.
We’ll come back to why that moment defines real leadership.
Experience Is a Tool — Not a Compass
Most leaders believe leadership lives in their past experience.
It doesn’t.
Experience tells you what worked.
Leadership decides what must change.
The past can inform decisions, but it cannot make them.
When leaders lean too heavily on “what’s always worked,” they stop leading and start defending.
Leadership isn’t about protecting yesterday’s wins.
It’s about preparing for tomorrow’s reality.
Yesterday’s Success Quietly Becomes Today’s Constraint
Here’s what happens in most SMBs:
The owner builds the business through grit and instinct
Those instincts become habits
Those habits become rules
Those rules quietly block growth
The very decisions that created momentum early on become friction later.
And leadership stalls not because the leader is wrong — but because they’re late to let go.
The market doesn’t care how you got here.
Your team doesn’t need a historian.
They need a guide.
Lead From the Decision in Front of You — Not the Story Behind You
Real leadership happens in present-tense decisions.
Ask yourself:
What decision am I avoiding because it contradicts how we’ve always done things?
Where am I clinging to past success instead of present truth?
What would this business need if it were starting today — not five years ago?
Leadership means choosing the future even when it invalidates the past.
That choice is uncomfortable.
That’s why most leaders delay it.
The Future Is Built by Leaders Willing to Act Before It’s Obvious
Intel survived — and dominated — not because Grove predicted the future perfectly.
He survived because he acted decisively in the present when the signals appeared.
He didn’t wait for consensus.
He didn’t protect legacy products.
He didn’t let experience override reality.
Leadership wasn’t found in Intel’s past success.
It wasn’t waiting somewhere in the future either.
It was forged in the moment Grove chose to move.
Ask yourself:
Where am I letting past wins delay a necessary change?
What decision would a new leader make that I’m resisting?
What problem am I managing instead of solving?
If nothing changes in the next 12 months, where does this path lead?
Leadership doesn’t come from where you’ve been.
It doesn’t magically arrive later.