I have been thinking about LIV Golf.
Not from a sports angle, but from a strategy one. When it launched, it was hard not to be at least a little intrigued. The money was real, the players were serious, and there was genuine energy around the idea that the old model needed shaking up.
And the traditional tours did what they always do. They kept playing.
Now the Saudi funding runs out in 2026. The PGA, the LPGA, and the DP World Tour are still here.
I have seen this pattern in organizations more times than I can count. A new initiative lands with resources and momentum, and suddenly everything that was working quietly in the background starts to feel insufficient by comparison. The established program gets squeezed. The proven approach gets questioned. The new thing gets the air.
Sometimes that is exactly the right call. Innovation deserves oxygen.
But I keep coming back to a few questions I think are worth sitting with before the decision gets made.
What would we lose if we walked away from the established program? Not in theory. In specifics. What relationships, what compounding value, what trust built over time would we be quietly trading?
What does the new initiative require beyond capital? Attention is finite. Leadership bandwidth is finite. What gets neglected when we redirect it?
Are we being drawn by genuine strategic opportunity, or by the feeling that standing still means falling behind?
What does our track record with similar bets look like? Not to discourage the move, but to understand the pattern.
And the one I find most useful: if both programs existed five years from now, what would each of them have needed from us today?
The tortoise is a boring archetype. But it keeps showing up in the results.
