What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation

3.4

MOURNING CORPORATE FAILURE

In the next chapter I'm going to talk about how you can design a company to be truly resilient; how you bake in an evolutionary advantage. But first, we need to tackle a fundamental question—one that may have already occurred to you. In a dynamic economy, is there any reason to care whether a particular company lives or dies? Or to put it another way, does organizational longevity have any intrinsic value—for shareholders, employees, customers, or society at large? If you're a venture capitalist or a free market ideologue, you'll likely answer “no.” I get that. In an open economy, there are a variety of mechanisms that make it difficult for a company to consistently misuse society's resources. Robust competition, ...