Why enduring identity comes from what we do consistently, not what we build or own

Institutions Outlast People, Leaders, and Buildings

Every institution you know has outlived its people, its leaders, and often its structures. Universities, companies, even cities survive massive turnover. The question is not if they survive, but why they endure.

Alan Watts once asked what makes a university a university. The students change every four years. Faculty retire. Administrators rotate in and out. Buildings are demolished, rebuilt, modernized. And yet, the University of California, or Harvard, or Oxford, remains recognizably itself.

Watts’s answer was simple. A university is not its parts. It is “a doing, a behavior, a university-ing process of study and experiment and so on.”

Institutions are less like monuments and more like music. Their essence is not frozen in place, it is continually performed.

Endurance Comes from Behaviors That Repeat

When we think about identity, we often point to artifacts: a logo, a mission statement, a set of values on a wall. These are important, but they are not the essence.

The real question is: what behaviors make this institution recognizable across generations?

Consider Patagonia’s environmental activism. The founder has stepped away. Competitors have tried to mimic its style. Products evolve. Yet the company is instantly recognizable because its behavior, using business to protect the environment, has been consistent for decades.

Patagonia has endured by repeating actions that reinforce its mission year after year.

Or consider a family business. Staff turn over, products change, even locations move. Yet what keeps customers coming back is the behavior that does not change: the welcome, the care, the reliability.

The essence is not in the furniture or signage, it is in the lived actions that repeat over time.

I see this truth in my own city, St. Louis. Leaders come and go, buildings rise and fall, yet the same spirit endures, and the same struggles persist. That deserves its own reflection, which I will share in a future piece.

The same insight shows up in research. A Harvard Business Review study on “The Living Company” found that the longest-lived corporations preserve their identity through values and behaviors, not through assets alone.

They honor traditions while continuously adapting, and they endure because their behaviors stay consistent.

When Behavior Stops, Identity Fades

If institutions are “doings,” then their survival depends not on preserving artifacts but on preserving activity.

Some organizations keep the signs and the structures, but the animating behavior is gone. From the outside they look intact. From the inside the music has stopped.

Cosmetic changes cannot revive them. New buildings or websites mean little if the core behaviors no longer align with the rhythm that once gave the institution life.

McKinsey’s research on organizational health confirms this: healthy organizations repeat behaviors that build trust, adaptability, and consistency. These daily practices predict long-term performance better than any mission statement.

Brands Are Built on Repetition, Not Decoration

This lesson matters as much for branding as it does for institutions. Too often, branding and marketing are treated as decoration. A fresh coat of paint, a clever tagline, or a one-off campaign.

These moves may create short-term attention, but they do not create enduring identity.

True stewardship of brand is stewardship of mission. As the Stanford Social Innovation Review explains, a brand must go far beyond the logo. It is a set of organizational behaviors that align purpose with actions.

When identity is built on repeated behaviors, the brand becomes authentic. As Ian Davis of McKinsey noted, values are meaningful only if they are reflected in actions and behavior, not words and mission statements (HBR).

At SLAM Agency, this is the perspective we bring to our work. We help organizations identify the behaviors that make them who they are, then design strategies that bring those behaviors to life in the market.

It is not about chasing attention. It is about playing the music so clearly and so consistently that people recognize the song, even when the singer changes.

Endurance Requires Keeping the Music Alive

A campus endures because students keep gathering, questioning, experimenting, and debating.

The same is true for institutions and brands. They survive when they keep doing the behaviors that animate their identity.

Patagonia is Patagonia because of its rhythm of activism. A family business is itself because of the care it shows customers generation after generation.

The music must keep playing. Once the dance stops, no building, logo, or legacy can bring it back to life.

For a deeper dive into the empirical research behind these ideas, see this extended research analysis.