The Founder's Ghost

“We do it this way because that is how the founder set it up.”

Every established company has a version of this sentence. Spoken with reverence, as if the original decision was carved in stone. But the person who built the company in 1998 did not know about cloud computing or remote work.

Honouring a legacy means understanding the intent and adapting it. Being trapped means preserving the exact form of a decision whose context has disappeared.

Robert Iger, returning to Disney, kept Walt’s creative vision sacred while evolving the operational structures. The purpose stayed. The methods changed.

The ghost does not have the keys. You do.