During my flight to Affiliate Summit East in Miami last month I read the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. The July-August issue was titled “Going the Distance” and it focused on long term success management.

The article that stuck with me the most was “The 4 Principles of Enduring Success.” A group from Innsbruck University School of Management studied European companies who have outperformed their competitors (more details here.) The results appeared to be based on current stock prices (which in itself is questionable,) however the points are valid if not containing a bit of common sense.

First, “exploit before you explore.” Great companies use their existing assets before moving on to greener pastures. If you are a one man band with attention deficit disorder, your in trouble. Web publishers: squeeze as much profit as you can out of your existing web properties. Marketers: saturate the heck out of what works.

Second, “diversify your business portfolio.” Can you exploit what you are good at and diversify at the same time? These sound contradictory; the author notes diversification in suppliers and customers. Web publishers: If 95% of your traffic comes from Google and 95% of your revenue from Google Adsense, watch out! Marketers: just the same as publishers, make sure all you income and leads are not coming from a single source.

Third, “remember your mistakes.” This may be common since, but in a corporate environment it takes effort to communicate failures that may have occurred even 5 years ago. Publishers & Marketers: Record your major changes in a journal, noting what works and what doesn’t. When dealing with future projects you can look back and identify success trends (I am doing this already with great results.)

Finally, “be conservative about change.” When 3 year old companies get eaten up for billion-dollar price tags and search engine algorithms send small businesses into bankruptcy taking things slowly seems insane. Perhaps a better take on the word conservative is testing things before going all in. That means understanding what you are getting yourself into rather than just trying to follow everyone else. Web publishers: Build sites up slowly, rather than working 3 months solid and rolling the dice on a launch. Marketers: gather market intelligence and run lengthy testing before dropping millions, or thousands, on a new product.

Harvard Business Review often has insightful articles. Unlike typical news magazines covering stories of the latest trends and events, HBR’s articles read like detailed case studies. Unfortunately retrospective views often lead to cherry picking facts, so it is fair to view the conclusions with some skepticism.