What they can't do is become another kind of organization.
If new nimble competitors working in a new way appear, old companies, with vastly more money but a settled bureaucracy, just slowly die, rather than adapt.
That's a big problem many companies are facing in this day and age.
For example traditional newspapers companies are transitioning to digital publishing. This not only impacts how content is published but also how content is produced for a different medium.
I heard a podcast a couple fo years ago with (I believe) the CTO of the NYT. He said that the digital part of the NYT was almost a different company altogether. In the past years I worked at a paper publishing/education company and that was my experience as well. I was in charge of the digital product dept and we were like a black box inside the company. Nobody there really understood how we worked.
- They'll use Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft OneDrive for file and document management, not because they're better products but because Microsoft wishes that they don't use a competitor's products and Big Japanese Car Co respects the desires of their partners.
- After a demo between a new company with superior in-car tech and an old partner with inferior in-car tech, BJCC chooses the old in-car tech because once you're a partner with BJCC, BJCC takes care of you through the good and the bad.
- If you direct a meeting, whether small or large and you say something incorrect, the one person in the crowd that noticed your mistake won't say anything and will actually nod their head in agreement and respect. This is due to the saving-face aspect of the culture.
- Bringing others on board with a decision when you don't have access to the primary data or analytics is much easier when it involves copying a competitor. It also diffuses responsibility if things go south. Saying we did secret teardowns of a Tesla model 3s and are basing our design decisions off these teardowns means you can say it was Tesla's decision, not "my" decision.
On the other hand, BJCC has historically cared a lot more about not pissing off car owners by making more reliable vehicles at fair prices that are less likely to break down. For that reason, at the end of the day, I buy a BJCC car.
It's the old argument of individualism vs. collectivism. The right balance is probably some amount of both.
Tesla with its valuation can afford to scale up aggressively as long as it can continue decreasing manufacturing prices with Wright's law.
In particular, the article talk about supply line disruption. Rebuilding your supply lines means you can't use the existing ones, and that's certain not to be cheap either.
I don't know if I agree with this unless you mean to define "good internal politics" as internal politics that drives a company to self-disrupt.
As shown by the article, self-disruption isn't possible as a big company because the friction of changing things like supply chains and other capital. You really need to start another company that, in a sense, competes (and sometimes at least for a time complements) the larger company. Good internal politics would help to not squash internal competition, but it isn't, I think, enough to purposefully set up that competition.
They make it quite clear in their public conversations that Tesla-style innovation rates are the goal, but in private conversations lament that they're stuck working in a 3-year product cycle due to the innovation rates in their supply chains (as most of the specs and hardware are generated in collaboration with external suppliers).
As a sibling comment mentions, this structure also creates lots of resentment in some of the traditional Toyota departments who are being disrupted by this.
Toyota is too dependent on their supply chain to piss them off by bringing too much in-house. Eventually they will get there but it’s going to be a slow delicate transition, because I don’t see Toyota taking a massive leap and reshaping the way they do things from top to bottom.