Ribot's Law

You're seeing it when a company's founding-era habits persist long after the context that created them has changed. "We've always done it this way" is Ribot's law operating at the organisational level.

You're seeing it when a pivot fails because the team's earliest market assumptions are encoded too deeply to overwrite. The recent strategy deck says one thing; the team's instincts say another.

You're seeing it when a founder's earliest mental models — learned in a first job or first company — dominate their decision-making long after they've moved to a different context.

Identify the founding-era assumptions your organisation still runs on. Stress-test the oldest ones hardest — they're the most resistant to change and the most likely to be outdated. When hiring experienced people, expect their prior-company instincts to persist; design onboarding to surface and address them explicitly.

Buffett has described his earliest investment lessons — learned from Benjamin Graham in the 1950s — as the foundation of everything that followed. Decades later, those principles remain his stickiest mental frameworks, even as he adapted his style (famously shifting from deep value to quality compounders under Munger's influence). Ribot's law explains both the strength and the risk. The strength: deeply encoded principles like margin of safety became load-bearing foundations for a sixty-year career. The risk: early-formed beliefs can become invisible constraints. Buffett himself has acknowledged missing entire sectors (technology) partly because his earliest frameworks didn't include them. For founders, the lesson is dual. Your earliest beliefs will be your most durable — choose them carefully. And audit them periodically, because Ribot's law means they'll resist updating even when the evidence demands it.