The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical

CHAPTER 10

MUSCLES: LEVERAGING SIZE AND SCALE

I always hate to talk about size, because of the idea that big, dumb, and stupid go together. But we have this incumbent advantage that we really have to use to our advantage. If all we do is ride the incumbent advantage, it will be a disaster, but having that gives us a fair amount of lead time to pivot in different directions.

—Charlie Scharf, CEO of Wells Fargo and former CEO of Visa

Among the people I see every day in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, it’s a fundamental article of faith that physical size and scale don’t determine success. People in my world frequently use the metaphor that large physical incumbents are lumbering dinosaurs, seemingly powerful but vulnerable to the next meteor ...