Retire your own best line.

principle — attributed to Don Welsh

In Chicago, Welsh measured success by gridlock: full hotels, packed restaurants, buses that could not move. He now calls that thinking backward, because a destination only succeeds when it models the shared values of its residents and not just its visitors. The harder discipline is retiring the idea that once made you famous. The metric that won you the job is often the one you have to abandon to keep doing it well.

For executives whose signature achievement is aging. The audit is to name the metric you are best known for and ask whether it still describes the outcome the community actually wants today.

reinvention, success-metrics, residents, shared-values