Divestitures: Creating Value Through Strategy, Structure, and Implementation

CONCLUSION

In an article in The Atlantic, author, musician, and businessman Ted Gioia cited two interesting statistics: as of January 2022, “old songs” represented 70% of the current U.S. music market, and the 200 most popular new tracks accounted for less than 5% of total streams.¹ Opining on the causes of the dearth of good new music relative to the hits of yore, Mr. Gioia remarked:

I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted for huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this ...