Designed to Survive — How to Stop Defending the Past and Build a Company That Survives Change. A book by Daniel Santos Cori.
How to Stop Defending the Past and Build a Company That Survives Change
The plan was flawless. The strategy, correct. The execution, perfect. And the company fell anyway.
Language
English
Format
Hardcover
Pages
126
Published
Oct 2026
The strategic plan is dead.
It wasn't bad luck. It's a pattern that repeats across every industry: companies don't disappear from bad decisions — they disappear defending decisions that were once right. And they almost never see it coming until it's too late.
Blockbuster said no to Netflix. Kodak invented the digital camera and died with the patent in its hand. Nokia wrote its own diagnosis and still couldn't move in time. They didn't lack intelligence or information. They had too much success.
After more than thirty years building, selling and watching companies rise and fall across several countries, Daniel Santos Cori gives the silent disease that kills them a name: Strategic Entropy™ — the degradation that corrodes a strategy while everyone executes it perfectly.
This is not a book for optimizing what already works. It is a manual for redesigning what still exists before it ceases to exist — a blueprint for business architecture in the age of artificial intelligence, where every competitive advantage expires faster than ever.
Trailer
01
The ASCENT method
A step-by-step architecture for questioning the premises that can kill your company before they do.
02
When discipline becomes the danger
Why efficiency and discipline, misdirected, become the accelerator toward the cliff.
03
A firm core, a fluid periphery
How to build an organization with a firm core and a periphery that reinvents itself without falling apart.
04
Every result is a lever
How to turn every result — especially the bad ones — into your next competitive advantage.
05
Pace, ownership and money
At what pace to rewrite your strategy, who should lead it, and where the money comes from.
06
Real, verifiable cases
Netflix, SpaceX, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Kodak and Blockbuster — plus one company that did almost everything right and fell anyway.
The author built and ran a company of thousands of employees for twenty years. He survived crises that sank his competitors and, when the moment came, closed it on his own terms. From that experience this method was born. He doesn't speak from the stands: he speaks from the field.
- CEOs, founders, executives and business owners watching the world change faster than their organization
- Leaders of small and family businesses who fear obsolescence creeping up unnoticed
- Readers who want strategy they can apply on Monday, not just theory
Straight answers.
Strategic Entropy™ is the gradual, silent decay of an organization's foundational assumptions under the anesthetic of positive results. It corrodes a strategy while everyone executes it perfectly, and it stays invisible on the balance sheet until it is too late.
Take the idea into your company.
Daniel also works with boards and leadership teams — workshops, keynotes and advisory.
Daniel Santos Cori — Designed to Survive