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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

> but what underlies the inability for firms such as IBM to continue to grow?

I think you've answered your own question with the examples you gave.

Alive companies: Environment hasn't changed much.

Dead/hobbled companies: Significant change in the environment around creating the product/service or distributing the product/service (or a substitute) which upended the competitive dynamic. 100s of companies try to take advantage of the new dynamic and the existing companies might win, but are just another 1 in the 100's who are vying to win the new game.

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I think you are abstracting the personnel too much from your analysis. Clearly Apple, for example, persists and thrives in a world with such dynamism. The difference is one of talent, and the internal organization therein.

Apple is a company that has rigeous processes and hierarchies. It also operates efficiently. So we are back to the start, both company types can thrive or die. Indeed, it is the brilliant leaders (at any level of the organization) that bring excellence. In one organization that may be knowing what to hack or where to take a shortcut, in another it may be knowing how to escalate things through the organization to push through an idea. The processes keep the train on track and on schedule, the escalation path is to still have a way to change tracks in time. The first takes a protective manager, the second a leader that knows when to ignore the rules. You cannot only have the protective managers but you also cannot change tracks every other day. Hence the enterprise.

Is the enterprise necessary to be manned?

They were 1 in 100 in a new (gigantic) game - smart phones. Sometimes an existing company will win. They happened to have a good set of people with the right skillset for the new game (phones basically became mini computers) so maybe it was really 1 in 5, but it wasn't a sure thing they would win in the new game. And I'll bet $1 they won't win in the next new game and everyone will lament what happened to the $3 trillion company who couldn't innovate.

They created the game.

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