Quote of the Day: Øystein Stray Spetalen on Success

Consistency is overrated in business. We’re told to “stay the course,” to grit our teeth through turbulence, to prove seriousness by refusing to budge. But markets don’t grade you on loyalty to a plan, they reward responsiveness to reality. That’s the uncomfortable clarity behind Øystein Stray Spetalen’s line: “In business, you have to be able to adapt and change your approach if something isn't working.”

The deeper point isn’t that change is virtuous. It’s that stubbornness is expensive. Customer needs drift. Competitors copy your differentiators. Technology erases yesterday’s edge with a quiet update. In that environment, a strategy isn’t sacred, it’s a hypothesis. Treating it like doctrine turns normal headwinds into existential risk.

But adaptation isn’t panic. The best operators define “not working” before emotions get involved: measurable thresholds, time horizons, and a few leading indicators, activation, retention, sales cycle length, acquisition cost, paired with what customers and frontline teams are actually saying. Then they run small, disciplined experiments: test pricing in one segment, pilot a new process with one team, A/B a message before rebranding the whole company. Good leadership holds the “why” tightly and the “how” loosely.

Øystein Stray Spetalen, a prominent Norwegian investor and philanthropist, has spent a career watching capital punish rigid thinking and reward clear-eyed iteration, experience that makes his advice less motivational and more operational.

May invites its own kind of reassessment: budgets reset, strategies get reviewed, teams feel the year’s momentum, or its drag. Apply this today by making a “kill, fix, or double-down” list anchored in data, not ego. That’s how resilience is built, not by never being wrong, but by shortening the distance between signal and response.