Success can make leaders forget that decisions have a context

In the late 1980s, ASML was far from the company we know today. It had few customers, consumed cash and, in its own account of those years, its future “hung in the balance.” Philips eventually provided a final helping hand. Its development also benefited from a Dutch innovation subsidy of 24 million guilders.

Four decades later, ASML is one of Europe’s most strategically important companies and the world’s only producer of EUV lithography machines.
When a story ends like this, it is tempting to read history backwards. The decisions of the survivor begin to look inevitable. Context gradually becomes scenery.

That history came to mind when I read The Roadmap to Future Prosperity, the report Peter Wennink, ASML’s former CEO, prepared at the request of the Dutch government. It calls for long-term choices, public investment and much closer cooperation between government, knowledge institutions and business.

On the surface, it is a report about economic policy. I also read a leadership lesson in it: good decisions are never simply right. They are right in relation to a particular time, place and set of circumstances.

Acknowledging those circumstances does not diminish ASML’s achievement. Its technological expertise, entrepreneurial courage and persistence were extraordinary. But the story also includes Philips research, public funding, customers willing to invest, specialist suppliers and a region whose capabilities took decades to develop.

The stories organizations tell about success matter. Repeated often enough, they become part of the culture. They teach people whose contribution counts, how decisions should be made and what no longer needs to be questioned.

Organizational hubris may begin here. Not necessarily with visible arrogance, but when a situated success becomes a universal explanation. “This worked under these conditions” quietly becomes “this is how success works.”

Seen in that light, Wennink’s report offers a useful counterweight. Its emphasis on cooperation recognizes that even exceptional companies operate within systems they neither created nor control entirely.

The leadership question is therefore not only: what did we do right?

It is also: what made it possible for our decisions to be right at that particular moment, and are those conditions still present?

Experience is a valuable lens. It should not become a blueprint.