Month: August 2026

Calling an employee “irreplaceable” sounds like a compliment.

For the company, it usually isn’t.

Every organization has people who know more than everyone else. They know how a certain system works, remember why decisions were made years ago, understand important clients, and somehow know how to solve problems nobody else can solve.

Companies often see these people as an advantage.

But if the company cannot function properly without one person, that person is also a single point of failure.

The problem becomes obvious when they leave, get promoted, take a long vacation or simply become unavailable. Suddenly nobody knows a password, how a process works, why a client receives a particular price, or what needs to happen next.

The knowledge existed inside the company, but it never really belonged to the company.

This is usually a structural problem rather than an employee problem. Important knowledge wasn’t documented, responsibilities weren’t distributed and nobody else was given enough exposure to learn.

Good organizations should obviously try to keep talented people. But they should also build systems that survive them.

Processes can be documented. Knowledge can be shared. Responsibilities can have backups. Important relationships can belong to the company rather than only to an individual.

The goal isn’t to make talented employees less important.

It’s to make sure their talent strengthens the organization instead of becoming something the organization depends on to survive.

If losing one person can break your company, your biggest problem isn’t losing them.

It’s everything you failed to build around them.

Business treats growth almost as if it were a law.

More customers, more employees, more offices, more markets, more revenue. If a company made €10 million last year, making €10 million again is somehow considered disappointing. It needs to make €12 million, then €15 million, then €20 million.

But why?

Growth makes sense when there is an opportunity worth pursuing. The problem starts when growth itself becomes the objective.

Every additional layer of a company creates complexity. More employees require more management. More markets require more coordination. More products require more resources. Eventually, a company can become significantly larger without becoming significantly better.

Some businesses would probably be stronger if they simply decided that they were big enough.

A profitable company with good employees, loyal customers and a strong position in its market isn’t failing because it isn’t expanding every year.

There is also an uncomfortable consequence of endless growth. Once maintaining growth becomes an expectation, companies eventually have to find it somewhere. They increase prices, reduce costs, lower quality, enter markets they don’t understand or create products nobody really needs.

At that point, growth stops serving the business and the business starts serving growth.

Of course companies shouldn’t deliberately stagnate. They should continue improving, adapting and innovating.

But improvement and growth are not the same thing.

Sometimes the smartest business decision isn’t figuring out how to become bigger.

It’s figuring out how to become better at the size you already are.

There is a difference between leading an organization and becoming the organization.

I recently saw a Sky Sports discussion about FIFA and Gianni Infantino that made this distinction very obvious. The criticism was not simply about whether Infantino is a good or bad president. It was about governance.

FIFA is a huge international organization made up of associations, committees, employees and stakeholders. Yet, from the outside, it can increasingly feel like FIFA and Infantino are becoming the same thing.

This is not only a FIFA problem.

Strong leaders are valuable because they give organizations direction. But the stronger the leader becomes, the easier it is for the organization to start depending on their personality, decisions and relationships.

Eventually, people stop asking what the organization thinks and start asking what the leader thinks.

That creates a strange contradiction. A leader can become so powerful that their strength actually makes the organization weaker.

Good governance exists partly to prevent this. Boards, executives, rules and checks on authority can look unnecessarily bureaucratic when everything is going well, but their purpose is to make sure an institution remains bigger than the person currently running it.

This matters in companies too, especially founder-led ones.

If every important relationship belongs to the CEO, every major decision requires the CEO and the company’s identity is inseparable from the CEO, then the organization hasn’t really been built to exist independently.

Great leadership should leave behind a stronger institution, not a more dependent one.

A leader should shape an organization without becoming it.