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# How a great mindset can become a bad habit
- URL: https://www.mindsetmethodmomentum.com/how-a-great-mindset-can-become-a-bad-habit/
- Published: 2026-09-23T14:36:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T14:36:43.000Z
- Description: The companies everyone wanted to learn from didn't have better methods. They had a mindset. Here is how it turns into the thing that sinks them.
- Author: Paul Worthington
- Tags: Mindset

> **TLDR** — The firms that were once the best places to learn your trade didn't teach better methods; they instilled a way of thinking, and the methods fell out of it. When the people who held that way of thinking moved on, the habits stayed, got written down, and became the culture. A generation later the organisation is defending its rules as its identity, and the rules now point in the opposite direction to the mindset that produced them. You cannot fix that by reissuing the handbook. You have to ask what each rule was for.

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## The best places to learn

Ask anyone of my generation where the good people learned their trade and you will get the same short list. The big engineering firms, one or two of the consumer goods giants, a couple of banks, a computer company or two. Management trainee schemes with a waiting list. We talked about them the way people now talk about a good university.

I went through one. What I remember is not the training courses, though there were plenty. It was the assumptions. How you were expected to treat a customer, what counted as finished, what you did when you saw something wrong and it wasn't your department. Nobody handed you those in a binder. You absorbed them from the people around you, who had absorbed them from the people before, going back to whoever started the place.

Then, one by one, those firms got into trouble, and the thing that struck me was how badly they responded. Companies that had been famous for judgement suddenly had none. And when you looked closely, the methods were all still there. The processes, the reviews, the training courses, the values on the wall. What had gone was the reason for any of it.

## The biography of a rule

Every rule in a great company starts life as an insight. Somebody with a clear head sees a problem, works out what matters, and does something about it. Because it works, other people copy it. Because they copy it, somebody writes it down so the new people can copy it too. At this point it is still alive. The people using it know what it is for, and they bend it when the situation calls for it.

Then the people who understood it retire, or get promoted out of reach, or leave. The rule stays. The new people follow it because it is how things are done, and because following it is safe. Nobody bends it any more, because bending it needs a reason and the reason left with the people. Now it is a methodology, in the sense this blog uses the word. A set of steps standing in for thinking.

And the last stage is the odd one. The rule becomes identity. It made us who we are. To question it is to question the company, and the company's history, and by implication the people who built it. So it gets defended most fiercely at exactly the point where it has stopped doing anything useful. Often it is now doing the opposite of what it was for. The firm that was built on the judgement of people close to the customer is now famous for the layers of approval that stop them exercising any.

That is the drag anchor. Not the old methods. The old mindset, with the mindset removed.

## The HP Way, and the firm that did not calcify

Hewlett-Packard had a name for its mindset and, unusually, wrote it down. They called it the HP Way, and it amounted to self-financed growth, products that were different, respect for the people, and divisions with real autonomy. It carried the company from valves to integrated circuits without losing its footing, because the autonomy meant the people close to the technology could act on what they saw.

By the 1990s, "restore the HP Way" had become the instruction to a new chief executive, and what it meant in practice was more decentralisation with no strategy on top. The divisions that had once been the point of the place were now fighting each other, and HP watched the internet go past. The values had not changed at all. They had simply stopped meaning anything, because nobody was asking what they were for.

> **"The handbook outlived the reason for it."**

Now look at the one that went the other way. Toyota's production system has been copied by everyone, mostly badly, and the reason it has been copied badly is instructive. Mike Rother, who spent years trying to work out why the copies failed, concluded that what the visitors took home was the visible tools, the boards and the cards and the pull systems, while what actually ran Toyota was an invisible routine of thinking that produced those tools in the first place. Toyota kept its mindset alive by teaching the thinking, and letting the methods change. The copyists bought a methodology that had calcified before it even arrived.

I have seen the small version of this too. I once inherited a budget process that nobody could explain, that everyone served, and that had been funding the wrong things for years without anyone noticing. Nobody had chosen it. It was simply there, and it was defended, when I questioned it, as the way we do things here. It had been someone's good idea once. I never found out whose.

## The fix

You cannot bring a mindset back by reissuing the handbook. The handbook was the output, not the input.

What you can do is ask a question of every inherited rule, and insist on a real answer: what was this for? Not what does it say, or who owns it, or how long have we done it. What problem did the person who invented it have in front of them, and do we still have that problem?

Three things come out of asking. Some rules turn out to have a good answer, and you keep them, now with the reason attached, which is the thing that lets the next generation bend them sensibly. Some rules have no answer anyone can give, and those are dead weight. And some, the interesting ones, have an answer that is the opposite of what the rule now does. Those are the ones to go after first, because they are the calcified mindset, and unpicking one of them tends to loosen the rest.

If you are lucky there are still one or two people about who held the original mindset. Find them before they go. Ask them not what the rules were but what they cared about. That is the essence you are trying to recover, and it never lived in the binder.

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