These profiles explore what strengthens a business’s ability to keep earning, and what can gradually wear it down.
We use the Meridian framework to connect visible results with the decisions, relationships and organisational conditions behind them. Each profile examines a pattern that helps explain the company’s direction and offers a question you can explore in your own business.
The analysis draws on public sources, including company reports, regulatory findings, research and reporting. Some evidence was available as events unfolded; other material emerged later and helps explain what happened. Looking back can reveal patterns that would have been much harder to establish at the time.
These are independent analyses of public evidence. None of the companies featured is an Adaptiv client, and we have not examined their organisations from within.
John Lewis: Giving employees a say when times get tough
When money is tight, you may need to change working hours, reduce staffing or ask people to do more. Your team may see consequences you have missed: customers left waiting, work piling up or experienced colleagues looking elsewhere. You need a way to hear that while there is still time to reconsider.
John Lewis built a formal role for employees in questioning the people running the business. In 2023, after a £234 million loss before tax and no annual bonus, those arrangements faced a difficult test.
Its experience offers a practical lesson for owners: how to give your people a meaningful say when the business is under pressure, with clear responsibility for the decisions that follow.
GE: Borrowing today’s cash from tomorrow
According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, reductions in estimated costs accounted for more than a quarter of GE Power's reported profit in 2016. In the first nine months of 2017, they accounted for almost half.
Those changes didn't increase what GE could bill its customers at the time. Reported profit rose, but so did the amount of revenue recorded that hadn't yet been billed.
GE was also under pressure to improve its cash figures. So it expanded an existing arrangement in which GE Capital, its financial services business, paid GE Power for the right to collect future customer payments. Some weren't due for up to five years.
What a new LEGO brick cost the rest of the business
For adults and youngsters alike, the LEGO we know today is a creative toy behemoth famous for its addictive building block toys, cinematic universe, video game franchise and parks and real-world experiences. I look back at my childhood and see the LEGO universe I imagined in my head while building my first Cosmic Cruiser, realised in today’s world.
However it wasn’t a journey of continuous upward compounding growth.
In 2004, LEGO was in serious financial trouble. Sales had fallen, losses had mounted and the company drastically needed to change how it worked.
How Carillion’s dividend outlived its cash flow
On 9 June 2017, Carillion paid £54.4 million to its shareholders.
Thirty-one days later, it announced an £845 million provision against the value of its contracts, suspended the dividend and lost around seventy per cent of its market value over the announcement and the two days that followed.
The dividend had been proposed on 1 March. It was Carillion’s sixteenth consecutive annual increase.
The rise itself was almost ceremonial: from 18.25p to 18.45p a share, an increase of two-tenths of a penny. The announcement carrying it was headed “Performance in line with expectations”. It pointed to a pipeline of contract opportunities worth £41.6 billion, put revenue visibility for 2017 at 74 per cent and said the group had a good platform from which to develop the business in the year ahead. KPMG’s audit opinion on the 2016 accounts was dated the same day.
How Patagonia protected its purpose from the next owner
In 1957 an eighteen-year-old climber walked into a junkyard and came out with a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, some tongs and a few hammers. He taught himself to blacksmith in his parents’ back garden in Burbank, made his first climbing pitons out of an old harvester blade, and sold them to friends at $1.50 each. He could forge two in an hour. Money was thin enough that before one summer in the Rockies he bought two cases of dented tinned cat tuna from a damaged-can outlet in San Francisco and lived on that.
That was Yvon Chouinard. Sixty-five years later, in September 2022, he gave away the company that grew out of that forge, valued at around $3 billion, and announced that Earth was now its only shareholder.
Cadbury’s takeover began before Kraft arrived
Cadbury wasn’t sold because it was failing.
On 19 January 2010, one week after reporting performance ahead of market expectations, its board recommended Kraft’s final offer. Revenue was growing. Margins had improved. The business had just made the strongest possible argument for its own future and received an offer valuing it at 13 times underlying 2009 EBITDA.
Cadbury could still say no. But it didn’t have anyone left with enough power to make no a final answer.
How Costco turned higher wages into lower costs
In April 2018, at a chamber of commerce lunch in Issaquah, Washington, Costco's then chief executive Craig Jelinek told a story against himself. He had once gone to the company's co-founder, Jim Sinegal, with a problem. "Jim, we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends." Sinegal's reply, as Jelinek recalled it, was short. "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out."
Nokia saw the iPhone coming, but couldn’t act on what it knew about itself
On 10 January 2007, the morning after Steve Jobs held up the first iPhone in San Francisco, people inside Nokia met to work out what they had seen.
The slides from that meeting are public now, held in the Nokia Design Archive at Aalto University, which opened to the world in 2025. The executive summary calls the iPhone a serious high-end competitor. Further down, the deck records that the user interface had been a strength for Nokia, that consumer research showed it slipping, and that urgent action was required. Nokia needed to build a touch interface to fight back, it said, and S60 should remain the focus.
Nokia didn’t fail because it couldn’t see what was coming, it saw the fault line the next morning.
Timo Partanen, then Nokia’s director of market and competitor analysis, was in the room. Speaking to IEEE Spectrum in 2026, he described the mood as untroubled. Apple was another competitor with a good product. If it worked, Nokia would do the same.
The numbers agreed with him.
How Toyota turned stopping work into a competitive advantage
Rick Madrid spent seventeen years building Chevrolet trucks at General Motors' plant in Fremont, California. It was among the worst factories in the company. When it closed in 1982 there were more than seven hundred grievances outstanding and absenteeism was running at roughly a quarter of the workforce, according to Paul Adler's study of the plant at the University of Southern California. Madrid drank on shift.
What do these patterns bring to mind in your business?
If one of these stories feels familiar, tell us what you are noticing and what you would like to understand. We’ll arrange a 30-minute conversation to discuss whether an analysis would help.
For analyses commissioned by 31 December 2026, the founding client rate is £900 + VAT. This covers one business or named competitor and one agreed commercial question, including a 90-minute fact-find, research and written analysis, and a 90-minute working session. We agree the scope before you commit.