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What Companies Can Learn From Cities About How to Survive
Companies are dying faster than ever but these cities may offer the key to survival
Co-authored with Mathew Chow
Organizations have long been engineered like fine-tuned machines: They allocate processes and resources (sometimes human) into specializations, each churning and passing their output to the next group. This efficiency allowed companies to scale, prevent competitors from entering the market, and dominate their industries. In turn, this growth meant even greater efficiency, resulting in tighter interdependence and connection between the machine’s parts.
In today’s business world, technology has made innovation and disruption constant. Businesses must quickly and easily adapt to succeed. But in organizations wired for efficiency versus fluidity, this requires unraveling, rethinking, and reorganizing many interrelated pieces.
We often see these machines abruptly reassemble — resulting in jarring employee experiences and decreased productivity — or decommission, building something new that causes more damage than value. As a result of the aforementioned technological change, companies are dying more quickly than ever: Today, the average age of an S&P 500 company is under 20-years-old, compared to almost…
