Are large companies doomed to failure?
It is hard to open the paper these days without seeing a story presaging the demise of a another industry titan. If you believe the articles, Microsoft, GM, Xerox, Dell and many other bellwethers will face, at best, a slow, uninteresting decline due to their failure to innovate in ways that disrupt the markets in which they compete. Even Google and Facebook have been mentioned as established companies that cannot innovate as quickly or profoundly as they could when they were smaller, had everything to gain, and far less to lose. In The Power of Pull (Basic Books, 2010) John Hagel of Deloitte has calculated that the average life expectancy of companies in the S&P 500 has declined from 75 years in 1937 to a mere 15 years today. So is a descent inevitable for the larger firms?
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