The world’s 500 largest companies generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits in 2019. Together, this year’s Fortune Global 500 companies employ 69.9 million people worldwide and are represented by 32 countries.
However, only twelve percent (12%) of the companies, included in the Fortune 500 in 1955, still exist today. The reasons are many: markets have changed and transformed, companies have merged, new business models have evolved, new competitors have been created and so on.
Change Management is Life Management!
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change” according to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
In a continuously changing new world, the only market is our planet. Customers are transformed from consumers into co-creators of value and products. Competitors are both clients, consultants and partners and the boundaries between companies become blurred and indistinguishable.
More than forty years of research at Harvard Business School suggest that the one under-appreciated parameter, so many organizations underestimated, is the innefficiency of their organizational structures to adapt to the new world conditions, that change very rapidly.