When I was twenty, I wanted to be a strategy consultant.

This was not an unusual ambition for someone studying industrial engineering and management at a school that fed the major consultancies. The allure was straightforward: the top firms recruited from the best programs, which meant you’d work alongside the sharpest people you could find, on problems more interesting than anything you’d encounter climbing a corporate ladder for two decades. You’d see dozens of industries instead of one. You’d fly places. The money was good. For someone who is, at his core, an intellectual tourist — fascinated by how things work, drawn to whatever seems most interesting at any given moment — it felt like an obvious fit.

The coursework reinforced the aspiration. Michael Porter’s five forces. Competitive positioning. Value chain analysis. The frameworks were elegant, and they carried an implicit promise: if you analyze correctly, you can prescribe correctly. Understand the competitive landscape, and you gain actionable leverage over it. The case studies we worked through had a satisfying tidiness — here’s a company, here’s a problem, here’s a snapshot of its situation. Analyze, prescribe, present with a bow on top. Get your pat on the head for a job well done.

I’d also landed a part-time job at a major corporation, which gave me a front-row seat to how strategy actually played out inside an organization. What I saw didn’t match the case studies.

The company’s internal strategy unit produced work that floated in air. When the strategists presented their musings to other parts of the organization, more senior and seasoned people had very little trouble poking holes in what was being peddled. Meanwhile, the company itself was cycling through restructurings at an accelerating pace. Alfred Chandler’s old argument that structure follows strategy had been inverted by the 1980s — others argued that strategy follows structure instead. But by the time I was watching, neither was following anything. The structure would get periodically shaken up in what felt like a desperate attempt to get some semblance of direction to take hold. The panic was palpable, even from where I sat.

Something wasn’t adding up. If the brightest kids from the best schools were training on these clean, tidy analytical frameworks, and the biggest companies in the world were hiring them, and the results looked like what I was seeing — restructuring cycles getting tighter, strategies floating in air, a perpetual gap between what was prescribed and what actually happened on the ground — then either I was too junior to understand what was really going on, or there was something the frameworks weren’t capturing.

I assumed it was the former. It was way above my paygrade.

Then I walked into a course on industry evolution and organizational ecology, and the nagging feeling got a name.

The professor was a historian. He stuck out at the strategy department like a sore thumb — no slick suit, no consultant pedigree — and I think he only stayed for a few semesters before moving on. But his course was different from anything I’d encountered. Where the standard strategy curriculum worked from snapshots — analyze a situation, prescribe a response — this course worked longitudinally. It asked what actually happens to companies and industries over time. Not what should happen according to the models. What does happen.

One statistic hit me hard. At that point, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company was around forty years before it was acquired, broken up, exited its industry, or otherwise ceased to exist as what it had been. Forty years. These are household names. Companies with immense resources, able to hire anyone they want, to engage the best consultants in the world. And yet they rise and fall in ways that are, when you look at the data, remarkably predictable in aggregate even as they’re impossible to predict individually.

The narrative being presented was descriptive rather than prescriptive, and the shift felt seismic. Maybe managers aren’t omnipotent. Maybe they’re heavily constrained by what they can actually do — constrained by the culture the company developed in its formative years, by the biases that got selected for during its growth, by the sheer impossibility of refactoring an entire organization in mid-flight. Maybe the massive corporation, for all its resources, is a ship being thrown around by currents and waves far larger than itself. And maybe — this was the part that really stuck — a company can be perfectly aware that it needs to change direction, staffed with brilliant people who see exactly what’s coming, and still fail to execute the turn. Not because they’re stupid. Because the structural inertia is that deep.

Michael Hannan and John Freeman, the researchers who formalized much of this thinking, had a way of framing it that I’ve never been able to shake. Organizations succeed by becoming reliable — by developing the repeatable structures and predictable behaviors that customers, regulators, and markets reward. But that reliability is purchased with rigidity. The resistance to change that makes you dependable in a stable environment is the same property that kills you when the environment shifts. The thing that made you successful is the thing that prevents you from adapting.

The thing that made you successful is the thing that prevents you from adapting.

The course didn’t tell me what companies should do. It described what happens to them. They’re born with certain properties, those properties constrain what they can become, and the competitive environment selects for or against them in ways that individual managers can influence at the margins but rarely control.

Devastating because it undermined the entire premise of what I thought I’d be selling as a consultant. The prescriptive promise — analyze the situation, recommend a course of action, watch the client execute — rests on the assumption that the client can actually steer. If the ecological view is even partly right, then the honest version of strategic advice is something much harder to package: we’ll help you understand the dynamics you’re embedded in, so you can recognize what’s happening to you and make slightly better decisions at the margins. That’s a valuable service. It’s also a terrible pitch. “We’ll help you see more clearly” doesn’t have the same commercial ring as “we’ll tell you what to do.”

Clarifying because it gave names to everything I’d been watching at work. The restructuring cycles that couldn’t find traction. The strategy that floated. The gap between what was prescribed and what was possible. These weren’t failures of intelligence or effort. They were structural. The people I’d been watching weren’t incompetent — they were pushing with a rope.

I don’t think I made a conscious decision to abandon the consulting path. It was more gradual than that. The prescriptive worldview lost its appeal as the descriptive one settled in, and I found myself retreating to the thing I’d always been good at — engineering, building things. The ideas from that course didn’t fade. They became part of how I see. Not as a framework I consciously apply — I don’t sit down and think about what Hannan and Freeman would say about a given situation. It’s more that certain structures of thought got planted and now I can’t help but see through them. The constraints on managerial agency. The way organizations calcify around their founding conditions. The difference between what a company knows it should do and what it’s structurally capable of doing.

I continued in the corporate world for a long time after that, but the center of gravity shifted — away from strategy, toward technical work, toward building things. Eventually I moved into the startup world and built a company of my own. The ideas traveled with me. The mortality rate of young companies is brutally real — organizational ecology calls it the liability of newness, and anyone who’s been through a startup doesn’t need the academic term to recognize the phenomenon. What the ecological perspective offers isn’t comfort. It’s a kind of honesty. The probability of failure is high, the environment will select for and against you in ways you can’t fully control, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s less personal than it feels. You take your lessons and you try something else.

The frameworks aren’t useless. They’re tools. But a professional craftsman isn’t only his tools. He’s also the judgment to know when a tool is appropriate and when it’s lying to him. Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the legendary engineer who ran Lockheed’s Skunk Works, once presented his management principles to his protege Ben Rich when Rich was considering getting an MBA. Johnson’s view was that it would be a waste of time — the real learning comes from doing the work — and once you’ve done the work, the principles either find you or someone helps you find them.

I think the ecological view humbles you in a way that’s ultimately productive. You stop believing you can prescribe outcomes and start paying closer attention to the dynamics around you — reading the currents, developing a sense for what’s structural and what’s noise. You can’t steer the ocean. But you can learn to read it, and that’s worth more than most people selling prescriptions would like to admit.

Whether I’d have been happier as a consultant, I genuinely don’t know. I lack the counterfactual. But I know that the ideas I encountered in that course made it impossible for me to sell the prescriptive promise with a straight face, and that everything I’ve done since has been shaped by their quiet, persistent influence. Some ideas, once you see them, don’t let you look away.