There’s a line I’ve always loved from the old comic strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” In business, truer words were never spoken. Most companies don’t get taken out by competition. They get taken out by themselves — by comfort, ego, and the quiet, creeping arrogance that follows success. The most dangerous rival you’ll ever face isn’t across the street or overseas. It’s in your own conference room.

Success is the most seductive drug in business. It feels great — and it makes you stupid. When everything’s working, people stop asking questions. They stop experimenting. They stop worrying about the customer because they start believing they are the customer. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years,” they say, as if longevity equals immunity from change.

But here’s the truth: the moment you stop being curious, you start becoming irrelevant. The companies that die aren’t the ones that fail fast — they’re the ones that succeed slowly, comfortably, predictably, until one day the market moves and they don’t. They’re still polishing their trophies while their customers move on to someone hungrier.

Curiosity is what keeps a company alive. Arrogance is what buries it.

You can spot a company in decline by how much time it spends fighting itself. Meetings become turf wars. Ideas get strangled because they didn’t come from the “right” department. The goal shifts from winning customers to winning arguments.

Meanwhile, the competitors you’re so busy ignoring are quietly eating your lunch. While you’re debating whose logo should go on the PowerPoint, they’re out there showing customers new ways to solve real problems.

Internal politics are worse than any external threat because they turn your own people into obstacles. Innovation doesn’t die from lack of ideas — it dies from lack of permission. It dies when good people stop speaking up because they’ve learned that change is punished and comfort is rewarded.

Want to know who your biggest competitor really is? It’s not the company down the road. It’s the meeting you just sat through where everyone agreed to “circle back” instead of decide.

The best leaders I’ve ever met share one quality: they are perpetually uncomfortable. Not in a neurotic, sleepless way — but in a driven, restless way. They know that the second they start coasting, gravity takes over.

If you’re in a leadership position, you owe it to your team to be the first one to challenge the comfort. Ask the hard questions. Walk the floor. Visit customers unannounced. Sit in on design reviews. Listen to the complaints instead of defending them away.

When you start feeling confident that “we’ve got this,” that’s the time to worry. Declare war on your own comfort zone before the market does it for you. Because the market will do it. Customers don’t care how long you’ve been in business. They care about how well you’re solving their problems today.

Leaders who build lasting companies never relax into success. They treat it like a temporary state — a momentary win in a much longer battle against complacency.

Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, titled his book Only the Paranoid Survive. He wasn’t wrong. The healthiest companies I know live in a constant state of productive paranoia. They assume someone, somewhere is working right now to beat them — and they’re probably right.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about alertness. It’s about refusing to let comfort lull you into thinking you’re safe. Great companies don’t spend their time talking about how good they are. They spend their time figuring out how to stay good when everything changes.

They don’t get complacent when they win a contract; they ask, “What’s next?” They don’t celebrate quarterly results for a week; they celebrate for an hour, then get back to work. They don’t fall in love with their current process; they fall in love with the pursuit of a better one.

Staying paranoid doesn’t mean being miserable. It means being awake.

No company ever says, “We’ve decided to become complacent this year.” It starts quietly. Someone says, “We’re doing fine.” Sales are steady. Margins are okay. Customers aren’t complaining too loudly. Everything seems… fine.

And that’s when the rot begins. “Fine” is business-speak for “we’ve stopped growing.” It’s the lull before decline. “Fine” is the enemy of great.

Think about every once-dominant brand you’ve watched fade away — Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry, Sears. At some point, every one of them said, “We’re doing fine.” They confused momentum for mastery. They thought stability was safety.

In reality, stability is stagnation in disguise. The world doesn’t stand still, and if you do, you’re already behind.

A company that’s “doing fine” today is setting itself up for panic tomorrow.

We love to blame external forces when things go wrong — the market, the economy, the competition, the government, the pandemic, the algorithm. But the truth is, those things only expose weaknesses we already had.

The real enemy is internal. It’s when people stop questioning. It’s when leaders stop listening. It’s when the mission shifts from growth to maintenance. It’s when the drive that built the company is replaced by the fear of losing what’s already been built.

If you want to see what that looks like, walk through a company that’s lost its spark. You’ll feel it immediately. The walls are covered in old awards. The meetings are filled with excuses. The sales calls are defensive instead of ambitious. Nobody’s asking, “What’s next?” because nobody wants the answer.

And the tragedy is, they did it to themselves.

The antidote to internal decline is simple — but not easy. You have to reintroduce discomfort. Not chaos, not panic — discomfort. You have to rebuild the muscle of curiosity, accountability, and urgency that got you here in the first place.

Start by asking:

• What would we do if we were starting this company today?
• What would we change if we weren’t afraid of breaking what’s “working”?
• Who in our company is challenging us — and who have we silenced because they make us uncomfortable?

Hire hungry people who ask why. Promote the ones who make you rethink your assumptions. Reward risk-takers, not rule-followers.

Most importantly, make it safe to tell the truth — especially the ugly kind. Because the sooner you face reality, the sooner you can fix it.

Comfort is the enemy of progress. Growth always requires discomfort — and a little paranoia helps too.

If your company feels safe, stable, and predictable — congratulations, you’re standing on thin ice. The world is changing faster than ever, and the companies that survive will be the ones that stay restless, curious, and uncomfortable enough to keep earning their success every single day.

We have met the enemy, and it’s us. But that’s good news — because if the problem is inside, so is the solution. It’s only common sense.