When Running Your Business Model Perfectly Becomes Your Greatest Weakness

Every company runs on a story. That story is called the business model. It explains how your company creates value, distributes value, and captures value through its value proposition.

Executives tend to mistake this story for a set of financial mechanics or operational choices. In reality, it is much more fragile—and much more open to reinterpretation—than most boardrooms want to admit.

Here’s the paradox: the better you get at executing your current business model, the more brittle it becomes. Efficiency can be the enemy of resilience.

Why execution breeds weakness

Optimizing a traditional business model usually means doubling down on routines, infrastructure, and metrics that were designed for a specific era of customer expectations. That works—until the world drifts.

The problem is not execution itself. The problem is when execution hardens into dogma. When every process, every KPI, every career path is locked into one version of the story, the organization stops listening for new ones.

Let’s look at three shifts in value that illustrate how quickly the story can change.

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Case 1 - Shifting value distribution: Dispatch value proposition moves to the user

In the taxi industry, dispatch was once considered indispensable. Owning the central office, the radio system, and the coordinators was seen as the backbone of the model.

Then came apps. Suddenly, ordering and coordinating a ride was outsourced to the user. Users and riders saw it not as a burden but as a benefit. They valued the control, the transparency, and the immediacy.

For the incumbents, dispatch was hard-baked into their model. It justified overhead. It was tied to their pricing. It defined their role. But customers were voting with their thumbs.

Lesson: what looks like an irreplaceable capability inside your model may be a disposable inconvenience from the outside.