Sustainability is a highly prioritized concept today. Alongside efficiency, scalability, and measurability, it is one of the four pillars of success criteria in this book. Placing the concept of sustainability in the development phase might seem a bit odd, but the truth is, this series focuses not on the stage where it is most important, but on the step where it must be addressed. Indeed, this is one of the primary struggles for entrepreneurs, individuals, or institutions worldwide.
Sustainability is often considered only after an institution or individual has grown and expanded. However, this is fundamentally the wrong timing. Sustainability is directly tied to structures and systems. Therefore, making improvements and adjustments for sustainability within a growing or already established entity actually means dismantling and reshaping many functioning parts. Because of this, the sustainability of any business, structure, or entity must always be tackled at the foundational stage.
So, what is sustainability? Essentially, everything is sustainable. Thus, this phenomenon is not the answer to a yes/no question. It is an hourglass. The question is not whether it is sustainable, but how long it can be sustained without suffering a loss of efficiency.
Here, we encounter four fundamental determinants: Resource, dependency rate, efficiency, and motivation. These are what dictate sustainability. Let’s detail them one by one.
A resource is the means we have at our disposal to execute, advance, or realize a task. If a person provides a service, the resource is time and knowledge. If a product is being sold, it is inventory; if an investment is being made, it is equity. A resource essentially dictates the boundaries and framework of a business. When the resource is depleted, that business can no longer be sustained. An attempt might be made to sustain it—and often, this should be the case—but resource utilization and consumption must not be confused with one another.
Dependency rate is the extent to which a business relies on others, alternative sources, market conditions, or any other variable. For instance, a company growing through investment whose core profitability fails to meet its growth index is not sustainable. Similarly, this is the reason behind the sustainability gap between the financial and retail sectors, or between banking and brokerage, as seen in both TURKSTAT and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. While the stock market is highly dependent on speculation, herd movements, and other factors, the banking sector relies on capital, money markets, and financial products. Consequently, the lower a business's dependency rate, the higher its sustainability.
Efficiency, though it will be detailed in later chapters, refers to executing a task optimally with the lowest effort or cost. In other words, the wider the percentage gap between the price paid (labor, capital, or time) and the business outcome (volume, value, or satisfaction), the stronger the efficiency. If efficiency is low within a company, an individual's work, or an organization, sustainability will inevitably be low as well.
Motivation, on the other hand, is directly tied to individuals. More often than not, in miraculous success stories, this is what single-handedly shoulders sustainability and makes the difference. We previously mentioned that people are the most critical assets. Here, we witness this once again. The level of motivation of the person or people at the helm on the road to success has frequently been the fundamental differentiator.
Sustainability, to reiterate, is one of the four core determinants dictating whether a venture will add a rung to its ladder of success or plummet downward. This must not be forgotten.
Now, let’s solidify these with basic examples and real-life case studies.
To see how a resource draws a boundary, one need only look at Quibi. Launching as a short-form video platform in 2020, the company started as one of the best-funded startups in the industry, raising $1.75 billion from investors. However, it burned through this capital on content production and technology so rapidly that it exhausted its means in a brief span of six months, and the platform shut down. The lesson here is exactly the distinction emphasized above: it was not the size of the resource, but the mismatch between the rate of resource consumption and the actual need of the business model that killed its sustainability.
We see another version of this same pillar in MoviePass. Entering the market in 2017 with the promise of unlimited movie tickets for $9.95 a month, the company quickly reached nearly three million subscribers; however, because it paid theaters full price for every ticket, each new user was actually draining more cash from the company's vault. Growth was consuming the resource rather than feeding it, and within eighteen months, the company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The resource issue here wasn't depletion itself, but rather the growth rate outpacing the resource consumption rate—another manifestation of exactly what was seen in Quibi.
The investment banks paid the harshest price for dependency rate in 2008. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers financed their long-term, illiquid assets through the short-term repo market, requiring them to borrow anew every single night. When market confidence was suddenly shaken, these banks could not roll over their debt and collapsed within days. Decades of scale and reputation provided zero protection against their dependency on a single external variable—market confidence.
Another striking example of dependency rate is Zynga. Reaching millions of users in the early 2010s with FarmVille and similar games, the company owed almost the entirety of its growth to Facebook's platform and algorithm. When Facebook changed how it displayed game notifications to users in 2012, Zynga's user traffic collapsed in short order, and the company's market value melted away by nearly ninety percent. Zynga's mistake was not making a bad product; it was anchoring its sustainability entirely to a single external channel it could not control.
We see most clearly how efficiency carries sustainability in the story of Toyota. While American automotive giants struggled with high-cost, inefficient production lines during the 1970s oil crisis, Toyota's Just-In-Time system and kaizen philosophy enabled it to manufacture using the same resources while wasting far less. This efficiency gap not only allowed the company to survive the crisis but also made its global expansion over the next fifty years possible. Efficiency operated here not as a matter of cost, but directly as a matter of survival.
Another example where efficiency transforms into sustainability is Southwest Airlines. While its competitors operated dozens of different aircraft models in their fleets, Southwest resolutely stuck to a single aircraft type—the Boeing 737. This choice radically simplified pilot training, spare parts inventory, and maintenance processes, allowing it to become virtually the only major American airline to remain continuously profitable throughout fifty years of industry crises. Efficiency emerged here as a direct consequence of reducing complexity.
The most well-known case where motivation alone made the difference is James Dyson. To develop the bagless vacuum cleaner, he produced exactly 5,126 failed prototypes; this process took fifteen years and he continued at the cost of mortgaging his home. Neither a corporate structure nor investor pressure forced him into this process—it was purely his own stubbornness and motivation. The sustainability behind the Dyson brand today actually rests on this single individual's ability to maintain the same motivation for fifteen years without any external incentive.
Another figure who pushed the limits of motivation is Colonel Harland Sanders. He attempted to bring his idea of turning his chicken recipe into a restaurant chain to life in his sixties while surviving on social security checks, pitching his recipe to different restaurants and being rejected roughly a thousand times. What kept him standing during this process was neither corporate backing nor an investor; it was solely his own persistence. At the foundation of KFC's global scale today lies this motivation, preserved by one person through years of rejection.
