If you open any business magazine today or listen to any of the pundits that go on TV to talk about business, you inevitably hear about what are the things either a leader needs to have or do and what companies must do to be successful. Yet even with all of this advise, even the biggest and the brightest somehow fail. Why is that?

The simple answer to that question is because it is natural. The more complex answer is below.

Everything we do or know work in cycles. We are born, we grow up, we age and we die. Empire's go through the same cycle as do flowers. Yet we always perceive our 'empire' to be different. Even when the third Reich said that it would last 1000 years, it was a cycle. That is to say that it had even set a time for it to expire. Fortunately for humanity, that cycle lasted way shorter than envisaged by its architects.

So why do some companies look like that they will go on forever? That is perception and not reality. Whether a company lasts 1 year or 500 years, it will experience its own cycle and then do what everything in nature does. It dies. That is not to be morbid. The death of something, while sad to those who are familiar with the subject, is the start of a new cycle for someone or something different. It just pains us to see it because it affects us in one way or another.

The cycle starts with pain and effort. It is an idea being born. It causes anguish and suffering. A struggle to be exact. Soon the cycle of understanding one's environment starts to kick in and one starts to feel one's way in the situation that they are in. This stage soon becomes one of growth because one has started to understand what needs to be done and how it is to be accomplished. Once that is over, the next stage of complicity and familiarity with one's surroundings causes one to lose the drive and settle on more mundane and personal issues. Eventually, in the cycle, one becomes passé and irrelevant. That is usually in the death throws of the cycle. However, why some companies seem to go on past human cycles has to do with the ability of the company to remove that leader as he reaches the stage of familiarity and bring in a leader who is two stages behind that when there is still fire in the belly. The more times a company can do that, the longer their cycle of longevity will be.

There is no magic to it. It is simply a case of following nature, understanding what is needed and then, more importantly in any business, is being able to do the change when it needs to happen rather than just understanding that it needs to happen but never doing. Thus succeeding to fail.