Be Like Water: What Adaptability Looks Like in 2026

When Bruce Lee was asked to explain his philosophy on adaptability, he gave one of the more famous answers in modern popular culture:

Be water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.

He was talking about fighting. But if you have been running a business lately, you probably hear something different in it. The world around you has been reshaping itself faster than most organizations can keep up with. Customer expectations are shifting, and the technology businesses are starting to rely on is almost unrecognizable from what it was just a few years ago.

For most of the last fifteen years, the response to shifts in the market followed this pattern: You bought software. Then you bought more software. You wired the new software to the old software using middleware and integration platforms. When that broke, you bought a fourth tool to monitor the first three.

According to BetterCloud's State of SaaS research, the average company runs 106 SaaS applications, with large enterprises above 5,000 employees averaging 131. Roughly half of those licenses go unused. That is the visible cost. The invisible one is the operational drag: workflows split across tools that were never meant to talk to each other, with seams patched by whichever engineer happened to be around when something broke.

This was the deal we made. SaaS gave us speed and modularity in exchange for fit. A vendor would build something for the broad middle of the market, and you would adapt your processes to match. If the tool covered 50% of what you actually needed, that was considered reasonable. Sixty percent was a win. The remaining gap was your team's job to close with spreadsheets, Zapier, and patience.

A lot of that vendor debt never went away. It accumulated. Every layer of duct tape stayed in production long after the person who taped it together had moved on.

What Changed

At the height of SaaS, the marginal cost of customization was high. Asking a vendor to build a feature for one customer made no economic sense. The shape of the cup was fixed because changing it was too expensive.

That math has flipped. In GitHub's controlled research, developers using AI coding assistants completed tasks 55% faster, with average completion times falling from 2 hours 41 minutes to 1 hour 11 minutes. GitHub also reports that Copilot now generates an average of 46% of the code written by users on its platform, with Java developers reaching 61%.

Take that out of the developer world for a second. What used to be a six-week build is now a six-day build. What was a custom integration project quoted at $40,000 is something a small team can prototype on a Tuesday afternoon. The economics of "make it fit" have changed by an order of magnitude.

Sequoia's Julien Bek captured the broader shift in a March 2026 piece called Services: The New Software. His opening line: the next trillion-dollar company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. The math behind that claim is striking. For every dollar businesses spend on software, they spend six on services. AI is starting to collapse that ratio. Work that used to require teams of people is becoming software, and software is reaching into the much larger services budget. The implication for buyers is just as real. Solutions can now form around how your business actually operates, instead of you forming around the software.

In practical terms, the fit you should expect is no longer 50%. With the right approach, it is 80% or higher.

You Can Be Like Water, Literally

Here is where the metaphor stops being decorative and starts being something you can actually do.

A business that is "like water" is not one that flexes for the sake of flexing. Water has a property worth thinking about. It takes the shape of whatever it is in, but it remains water. It does not become the cup. The cup just becomes its boundary. When the conditions change, water moves.

The companies that will win the next decade share that property. They are clear on what they are and what makes them genuinely different from everyone else in their category. The shape of the operations around that core can change quickly. The core does not.

Until recently, that was a nice idea with no real path to execution. The cost of reshaping your operations was too high to do it often. The tools and the partners to do it well were not available at any reasonable price. So most companies talked about agility and practiced rigidity. They subordinated their operational details to whichever platform they bought. You got Salesforce, and your sales process was now whatever Salesforce thought a sales process was. You got NetSuite, and your finance team learned to think in NetSuite's data model. The platform was the lake. You were a fish in it.

Going forward, the lake can move with you. That is a real shift, and it has implications for how you make decisions about technology and partners.

Reading the Current Faster Than Your Competition

One immediate consequence is that the cost of paying attention has dropped. When acting on a trend used to require six months of platform reconfiguration, most companies did not bother. They reacted late or not at all. The trend would be played out by the time the new workflow was live.

Now, a retailer noticing a shift in how customers ask about a product category can stand up a new internal tool to track and respond in days. A clinic seeing new patterns in patient intake can adjust its workflow without filing a ticket with a vendor in Atlanta. The companies that take this seriously will be the ones who reposition fastest when something in their market moves.

If your competitor can adapt in weeks and you take quarters, the gap compounds. Quickly.

Knowing What You Are Not

Now, the part that most thought leadership posts skip.

Being like water sounds liberating until you actually have to run a company. Most operators reading this already know the bottleneck is not enthusiasm for AI. It is bandwidth. You have a product to ship, and a team that is already running close to full. The opportunity to reshape your operations exists, but the hours to do it do not.

This is where the philosophy gets practical. Adapting quickly does not mean doing everything yourself. It means knowing what you should hold close and what you should hand off.

The work that requires your specific expertise, customer relationships, and judgment is the work you cannot delegate. The work that is real but not strategic is exactly the kind of work that should sit with someone whose entire job is to do it well.

Historically, "bringing in help" meant one of two unappealing options. You could hire a big consulting firm that arrived with a slide deck and a methodology and tried to reshape your business to match. Or you could hire a body shop that gave you developers who would build whatever you specified, including the wrong thing if that was what you specified.

Both models had the same underlying flaw. They started with what the firm wanted to sell and worked backward to your problem. The output looked impressive in the deck. It rarely fit how the business actually ran.

The Newer Model: Partners Who Shape Themselves to You

The version of partnership that makes sense in this era inverts the relationship. You bring in people whose expertise is technical and operational, not strategic. They are not trying to tell you what your business should be. They are trying to understand how it actually works, and then build solutions that match.

This sounds like a small distinction. In practice it is the whole game.

A partner who shapes themselves to your operations does a few things differently. They spend time understanding your business before recommending anything. They build with the assumption that your team will keep doing the work, and the technology should make that work lighter rather than replace the people who understand it. When the market moves and your operations need to shift, they shift with you instead of explaining why their initial blueprint is still correct.

You can usually tell which kind of partner you are dealing with within the first few conversations. The wrong kind shows up with a product pitch and tries to map your situation onto it. The right kind asks questions, takes notes, and is comfortable saying they need to understand more before they propose anything. They are also comfortable telling you when something is not worth doing at all.

This is the model that fits the era we are now in. Less "buy the platform and conform." More "build the platform around how you already work, with help from people who know how to build."

What This Looks Like in Practice

Step back and consider what a company that takes this seriously actually does.

It stops thinking of software purchases as long-term marriages. The strongest tools in the stack are the ones that can be replaced or reshaped as needs change. Lock-in gets treated as a cost rather than a feature.

It invests in understanding its own operations more deeply than its vendors do. The knowledge of how the business actually works lives inside the company, not in a consultant's deliverable from three years ago.

It picks partners who can move at the speed of the market rather than the speed of a procurement cycle. When something needs to change, the answer is not "let's revisit this in the next quarterly planning session." The answer is "what would we want to be true by next month?"

And it accepts that some part of the operation will always be in motion. That is not a problem to solve. It is the shape of working in this decade.

Be Water, My Friend

Bruce Lee's original point was that rigidity loses fights. A fighter who has a fixed set of moves can be read and countered. A fighter who responds to what is actually happening in front of them, in the moment, has an enormous advantage.

The same is true of businesses now. The advantage no longer goes to the company with the most comprehensive five-year technology roadmap. It goes to the company that can read the current and reposition without breaking what made it valuable in the first place.

The good news is that the tools to do this exist in a way they did not before. The harder news is that adopting them well requires a kind of clarity about your own business that most organizations have never had to develop. You have to know what you are and where your real expertise sits. Once you know that, the rest can flow around it.

That is, more or less, what being like water looks like in 2026. Stay clear about the core. Let the shape change. Bring in people who help you do both.