A few years ago, most Malaysians had never heard of pickleball. Today, courts, coaches, tournaments, and equipment retailers have all emerged around it. But not all of them will last.
When a trend takes off, the first wave of businesses benefits from the early excitement. Then competition catches up. Courts multiply, prices get squeezed, the early crowd moves on to the next thing. The businesses that survive that shift aren't just lucky — someone inside them saw it coming and made the right calls. Someone who understood their costs, knew their customers, and could read where things were heading before it was obvious.
It's easy to think business success comes from having a good idea or being first to market. But the harder question is what keeps a business going once the initial momentum fades and that almost always depends on the people inside it.
And it's not just pickleball. Businesses everywhere are navigating a world that keeps shifting - a new competitor enters the market, a supply chain gets disrupted, consumer behaviour changes overnight, a policy shifts the rules of the game. Whether it's a local court operator responding to a price war or a multinational adjusting to geopolitical pressure, no organisation figures that out on its own. People do.
So, if the world keeps changing, what does it take for business to remain relevant?
