The fate of big companies

In all over the globe, we see companies that used to dominate the market has shrunken and merged by other companies or declared bankruptcy. It seems that there is a trend that the bigger they become, the more likely to fail.

In recent example, a major technology company "Kodak" which had more than 80% share of camera and film sales in 90s, applied bankruptcy and end the 130 years of camera and film production. After this happened many people says that they fail to keeping up to the digital world, however, people engaging in management and leadership research claims that the structure is the point to argue for that failure.
John Kotter ,who is a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that an over going complacency or self-satisfaction have became the barriers to shifting organization. They overlooked minor problems and had little urgency to the situation when their rival companies begins to appear and with the hierarchy created by development of companies and let them to cause tragic.


So, what I learned from this example. I think there will be two things. One is to take problems into opportunity and do not ignore them only because they are minor one.We should not also have complacency to ourselves. As we already learned in Chapter 3 “Optimism and Reality” quotes from Nicolich saying “we need to look at adversity and see opportunity”, we should not escape from those problems or situation of disaster.

The other one is the importance of communication between people and less hierarchical relationship between people. As the example shows, the solid hierarchy relations prevent the delivery of ideas, solutions, we need to have employee to have place to voice up or ,if possible, to have less hierarchy inside organization. The latter one is very unique to big companies, because the bigger companies it grows, the more manager will be remote in nature.