Good points. Will you agree that businesses die due to unprofitability? And what causes unprofitability in a firm? One might answer a whole slew of reasons, such as profit erosions, but it is mostly due to lack of innovation; at least at the rate in which business cycles naturally move external to the business firm. It is the decaying rate of sales growth, then, which seems tautological, but what underlies the inability for firms such as IBM to continue to grow?

I recognize it takes four years for McDonalds to add a new product to their global supply chain. That is a symptom of scale which the administration therein attempts to streamline. In the likes of $KO, I would wager there is less complexity in the internal administration of manufacturing a beverage which has not changed in recipe in a century, and which takes nearly the same amount of time to launch diet coke. The good manufacturing practices, in other words, have not changed nor do they need to as KO continues to grow in market share globally for beverages.

Meanwhile, business computing has simply exploded since 2010 yet IBM's revenue has shrunk ~30%. Are you to suggest it is not the personnel that are responsible for its tepid business development in response to a market which moves fast and breaks things? That maybe the preservation of the internal cohesiveness of the organization as intrinsically valuable kills companies in the presence of new market environments which the organization is motivated to be responsive at the risk of termination? I advise reading The Innovator's Dilemma to corroborate my assumption.