Unlock Your Superpowers

This week, Workday announced that co-founder Aneel Bhusri will be returning to the CEO role. The provider of HR and finance software has been posting solid results. Subscription revenues rose 17% last year to $7.7 billion, and the company projects revenues will reach $8.8 billion in 2026. Recurring demand for its cloud services remains strong.

And yet, Workday’s stock is down 45% from a year ago. Investors are questioning the long-term viability of enterprise software in the face of AI disruption, new competitors, and shifting customer expectations for how software should be built and priced. Surprisingly, the company’s board decided that the leader best suited to help Workday navigate the future was the person most closely tied to its past.

They may be right. Bhusri isn’t just a founder—he’s the architect of the company’s original product philosophy and customer promise. He understands how Workday earns trust with large enterprises, how its culture balances innovation with reliability, and how it differentiates itself in a crowded market. At a time when Workday’s future is most uncertain, the board chose a leader who best understands what makes the company great.

Play to Your Strengths

In times of rapid change, it’s critical for a company to know what makes it particularly differentiated. What it should hold onto and leverage. And like in most things, a leader’s mindset will shape what they pay attention to. Past focused leaders will retreat into comforting bromides of heritage and nostalgia. Present focused leaders will overvalue current assets and customer relationships. Future-focused leaders pay much more attention to a company’s capabilities—not just what it owns, but what it knows how to do.

That’s a big difference. Future focused leaders recognize that enduring performance is built on a core set of capabilities that competitors struggle to replicate. It comes from deploying your own strengths better than anyone else. Markets shift. Technologies evolve. But if a company doesn’t know its own superpowers, it can’t leverage them. And it levels the playing field for competitors.

The idea that you should play to your strengths is actually quite new. For decades, we thought that the path to improvement was to benchmark high achievers, measure your own performance, and then close the gap. But at the end of the last century, something in society started to shift.

C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel were among the first to notice that shift. In 1990, they published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Core Competence of the Corporation.” In that piece, Prahalad and Hamel showed that successful companies don’t try to be good at everything. Instead, they focus on a unique combination of capabilities that set them apart from competitors. As they saw it, companies needed to identify what makes them great and then build on that. They needed to find their superpowers.

Prahalad and Hamel weren’t alone in having that insight. In professional sports, teams started to invest in performance analytics, role differentiation, and specialized training. In 1998, Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association. Seligman argued that the way psychologists thought about human performance was backwards. Rather than just trying to understand why people were broken, Seligman believed that science should also study what makes people thrive. He understood that excellence grows more reliably from cultivating what’s strong than from obsessing over what’s weak.

And then came StrengthsFinder.

Don Clifton was an American psychologist who is often called the “father of strengths psychology.” Clifton spent decades researching high performers across roles and industries, looking for recurring patterns of talent. Like Seligman, Clifton helped shift the cultural lens from remediation to reinforcement. He argued that growth accelerates when energy is invested in what people already do well. In 2001, Clifton’s company Gallup launched StrengthsFinder as a tool to help people figure out what their superpowers were. That launch marked the moment when strengths-based philosophy moved from research into a widespread organizational practice.

Of course, it’s now a few decades later, and many of us still struggle to articulate what makes our companies great. Ask a leadership team to list its strategic threats, and the whiteboard fills up quickly. Ask that same team to name the three or four capabilities that consistently create disproportionate value, and the room often goes quiet. The language turns generic. The answers drift toward aspiration instead of evidence. Even after years of research urging us to build on our strengths, most people’s instinct is to focus on their gaps. And we do so for the most human of reasons.

A Negativity Bias

In 2001—the same year that StrengthsFinder launched—psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman set out to make sense of a pattern that kept appearing across experiments in social psychology. Study after study showed the same asymmetry: a single criticism outweighed multiple compliments. One bad interaction colored an entire relationship. A small defect reduced the perceived value of an otherwise excellent product. When Rozin and Royzman pulled the research together, their conclusion was stark: negative events carry more psychological weight than positive ones of equal intensity. They called this negativity bias.

This tendency to overweight negative characteristics seems to be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. For the vast majority of human existence, the cost of missing a threat (like a saber-toothed tiger or a poisonous plant) was death or social exclusion. By comparison, the cost of missing positive opportunities (like an extra meal or a gathering around the fire) was relatively low. For the sake of survival, our brains are wired to register threats more strongly than advantages. Our brains didn’t evolve to make us happy. They evolved to keep us alive.

In the modern world, our brains’ negativity bias nudges most of us to focus on what we suck at and be blind to things that other people would say we’re great at. When asked to identify our greatest strengths, most people struggle and feel a twinge of embarrassment. Talking up our best attributes feels profoundly egotistical. Worse, we actively discount our unique gifts as obvious things that most people probably have. Not only is that negative focus a crappy way to live, but it’s also no way to achieve greatness.

In my experience, successful leaders can suffer from a negativity bias that’s more acute than that of other people. They’ve reached their positions because they’re good at identifying flaws and fixing them based on an abstract ideal of perfection. For many of them, it’s become a core component of their success. Their attention is drawn to gaps before opportunities. In operating reviews, they scan for red flags. In talent discussions, they look for weaknesses. The muscle that helped these leaders succeed begins to shape what they see. And because organizations mirror the cognitive habits of their leaders, the entire system can become astoundingly bad at noticing its own superpowers.

Losing Our Way

Too many companies never do the hard work of investing the time and effort to understand what they’re truly great at. Others used to be clear about their strengths, but then drifted over time as they tried to be something they’re not. And yet, the best companies are great at a few things. Those companies double down on their superpowers and are okay with being just average about other stuff.

When companies forget their superpowers, they don’t fail randomly. They fail predictably.

Starbucks excels at creating human-centered retail experiences that foster connection. Boeing excels at managing complex technical execution in an environment where success or failure can mean life or death. Nike is brilliant at navigating sports culture and creating a steady stream of innovations. And yet, all three of those companies stumbled in recent years when they tried to be something they’re not. Starbucks flooded its menu with new drinks that overwhelmed its baristas. Boeing tried to outsource its execution to a network of suppliers. And Nike shifted its focus to better execution. In each case, senior leaders relied on outside consultants and experts for advice on how to get better. The results were as successful as giving Tiger Woods piano lessons or forcing Mozart to play golf.

Fortunately, there’s still hope for those companies. It takes a while for an organization’s superpowers to completely fade away. When they do, it’s often the result of negligent owners (think Daimler owning Chrysler), multiple mergers and acquisitions (think Hewlett-Packard), or successive rounds of weak leadership (also HP…). For the rest of us, though, those superpowers are merely dormant. And it’s possible to activate them again.

Disney Gets Back to Greatness

When Michael Eisner took over as CEO of Disney in 1984, one of the first things he noticed was the enduring influence of its eponymous founder. Walt Disney’s portrait was on every wall. When faced with a difficult decision, people would regularly ask, “What would Walt do?” And yet, in 1984, Disney was floundering. Its share price had languished for years. Its content had lost cultural relevance. Financiers were circling for a hostile takeover.

Eisner saw that Disney needed to reconnect with its fundamental superpowers. Its ability to tell stories. Its ability to create compelling experiences. Its skill in managing creative talent. And its power to roll out content globally in multiple media and formats. And all of those superpowers had started with Walt.

Of course, activating Walt Disney’s legacy wasn’t about getting lost in nostalgia or dusting off the founder’s old playbook. It was about reconnecting with Disney’s dormant superpowers and leveraging them in new ways.

After taking the helm, Eisner’s first steps were to fight off those takeover threats and assure investors. But then Eisner got to work. In the years that followed, Eisner activated the company’s DNA to supercharge its creative output, launch new content, and monetize it across film, TV, parks, merchandise, and home video. From the asset-rich but creatively disjointed company he inherited, Eisner and his successor Bob Iger transformed Disney into the entertainment powerhouse it is today.

Find Your Superpowers

Over time, every organization has its fair share of good days and bad days. Success is about figuring out when your best days were and trying to have those days every day. In times of rapid change, companies succeed when they become more like themselves rather than the far more common tactic of copying others.

Which brings us back to Workday. Aneel Bhusri may discover that founding a company and refounding it are two very different tasks. He may get caught trying to replay an old playbook in a market that has fundamentally changed. Founders aren’t immune to nostalgia, and past success doesn’t guarantee future relevance. But if Workday is going to navigate AI disruption and shifting customer expectations, it will need more than new features or clever pricing. It will need a clear understanding of what it has always done better than most and the discipline to extend those strengths into a new era.

The same goes for Disney. After retiring for the second time, CEO Bob Iger has named head of parks Josh D’Amaro to be his successor. D’Amaro will need to hold onto what makes Disney great, even as he revamps the company to meet the challenges of an AI-transformed world.

For the rest of us, the lesson is clear. Take the time to name the short list of capabilities that truly set your company apart. Make them as precise as you can. Focus on your abilities, not just your assets. Then build your strategy around deepening and extending those strengths.

In a world obsessed with what’s next, start with what’s already yours. The future rarely rewards blind imitation, but it favors companies that know who they are.