The Crucible – What the businesses that refused to die can teach every leader

Steven N. Adjei — Pharmacist, Entrepreneur & Author of Chasing Permanence   13,500. That is how many British businesses close on our high streets every year. I know some of them — not as statistics, but as people who got up every morning for years, opened the shutters, and tried to make something work in conditions that were working against them. I also know the ones that didn’t close. And the difference between them is not what most people think.   Same street. Different outcomes. Same footfall. Same rates. Same competition from Amazon and the supermarkets and the out-of-town retail park that opened ten years ago and took a third of the trade with it. One business closes. The one next door does not. If the explanation were external — the internet, the pandemic, the economy — they would both close. Or both survive. The external forces are real. But they are not sufficient. Something else is happening. Something that lives inside the organisation rather than outside it. I ...