The Unicorn That Lost Its Horn: All-Time Strategy Trap Fail #5
In early 2019, WeWork was one of the most talked-about companies in the world.
It was valued at $47 billion.
Investors lined up for an IPO that was imminent.
It felt unstoppable.
And then it all came crashing down.
Within months, confidence evaporated, the narrative unraveled, and the valuation collapsed with stunning speed.
The Vision Made Sense
Flexible office space wasn’t a gimmick. Companies wanted agility instead of long-term leases. And WeWork tapped into a real shift in how people worked.
Led by Adam Neumann, the company promised more than desks and conference rooms.
It promised community.
Energy.
A movement.
Even—famously—to “elevate the world’s consciousness.”
The vision was bold. But bold vision without discipline is fragile.
The Trap: Scale Without Capacity
As WeWork scaled, ambition quickly outpaced reality. The company took on massive long-term lease obligations while chasing rapid short-term growth. Spending ballooned. Side ventures multiplied. Organizational complexity increased faster than the company’s ability to manage it.
Growth became the goal—untethered from financial sustainability, operational readiness, or governance capacity.
When WeWork filed its S-1 ahead of the IPO, the curtain lifted. Investors finally saw the losses, the tangled governance, and a business model built at a scale it could not sustain.
And the story changed—fast.
How the Six Cs Would Have Helped
In my book, The Strategy Trap, I introduce a system called the Six Cs. They are the execution conditions teams need to turn bold ideas into sustainable results.
WeWork didn’t fail because flexible office space was a bad idea.
It failed because those execution conditions weren’t in place.
Two of the Six Cs stand out.
Capacity
Capacity ties ambition to what an organization can actually sustain financially, operationally, and organizationally.
At WeWork, expansion speed far exceeded reality.
There was no discipline forcing hard questions like:
Can this model withstand a downturn?
Do we have the leadership bandwidth to manage this level of complexity?
What must be true for this pace of growth to remain viable?
Capital masked the problem—until it didn’t.
A real Capacity discipline would have slowed expansion until the foundation was sound, instead of chasing breakneck growth on borrowed time.
Coaching
Coaching creates the culture that makes capacity limits visible.
Effective Coaching builds psychological safety, invites challenge, and reinforces disciplined execution—especially when momentum is high.
At WeWork, there was little evidence of a consistent culture that encouraged leaders and teams to slow down, surface tradeoffs, and pressure-test assumptions as the company scaled.
Without that coaching:
Confidence went unchecked.
Dissent disappeared.
“Action” superseded judgment.
And the Capacity problem was allowed to grow until it became impossible to ignore.
The Lesson
Charisma can fuel momentum. But momentum without capacity is dangerous.
Ask yourself:
Do we have the discipline—and the culture—to match our ambition to reality before scale makes that impossible?
Master the Six Cs
These stories are the warning signs.
The solution is the system.
You can learn how to apply Co-creation, Capacity, Clarity, Communication, Coordination, and Coaching in my upcoming book, The Strategy Trap.
Pre-order at TheStrategyTrap.com.
Next up: Failure #4 — how a mobile phone giant had the future in its hands… and still couldn’t get its teams to talk to each other.
