Success Quote by Maurice Strong

A businessman’s plainest sentence can double as a quiet diagnosis of institutional disease. “The tendency is to keep doing things the way you have done them” is Strong’s compact summary of inertia as a default operating system: not a moral failing, a risk-management reflex. “Tendency” is doing the heavy lifting here. It suggests something almost automatic, like gravity, and it politely sidesteps blame while still pointing to the predictable outcome: organizations repeat themselves until reality forces a rewrite.

The subtext is boardroom-native: continuity feels like competence. Repeating established processes signals stability to investors, regulators, and employees; it protects careers because the cost of being wrong in a familiar way is often lower than the cost of being wrong in a novel way. Strong’s phrasing also implies a built-in asymmetry of incentives. Success is credited to strategy; failure is absorbed by the system. That’s how “we’ve always done it this way” becomes a shield rather than a choice.

Context matters with Strong, a figure associated with global environmental governance and the long arc of sustainability conversations. In that world, the quote reads less like generic advice and more like a warning: incrementalism can be a form of denial when the underlying conditions are changing fast. The line doesn’t romanticize disruption, but it nudges leaders toward a harder truth - that past methods can become liabilities. Its effectiveness comes from its understatement; it’s the kind of sentence executives nod at, then realize it’s about them.