The Changing Environment
We are now living in a fast changing world where opportunities and challenges happen anywhere at any time. Mr. Barton has said that the average lifetime of a Top-500 corporation in 1935 was 90 years, while it decreased dramatically to 18 years in 2012. Many former giant companies have failed or disappeared over last decades, like Kodak, Compaq, etc. However, a great many new powers has come to compete in the new era and some of them have become young giants in the business world, like Facebook, Google, etc.
It is hard to say if there are more advantages for corporation development in the present world than in the past, but what is clear is that we can learn from the past and make proper decisions for our future development. As I see it, the most important lesson we can learn from the history is that if you just keep standing at the same point and don’t think about moving ahead, you will be abandoned by the age. The best example for this is Kodak. Kodak used to be the biggest imaging and photographic equipment company in the global market. It made a great success in photographic film age, but when the digital age came, Kodak fell heavily down to the earth. Why? It is not because the lack of technology because it’s Kodak that invented the first digital camera. The reason in essence is that it refused to make a change when all the surroundings were changing. When digital technology spread quickly all over the world, Kodak tended to stay in the quite profitable film industry and made no reaction to the digital trend. It blindly believed that the lifetime of photographic film industry wound not end in the future decade, whereas the fact was almost all the consumers gradually chose to use digital cameras. Finally, the former titan becomes an old man who is fighting for surviving. In contrast, its rival Fujifilm has made a successful transformation and is making a large number of profits. The other point that impressed me a lot is that for future leaders,
It is hard to say if there are more advantages for corporation development in the present world than in the past, but what is clear is that we can learn from the past and make proper decisions for our future development. As I see it, the most important lesson we can learn from the history is that if you just keep standing at the same point and don’t think about moving ahead, you will be abandoned by the age. The best example for this is Kodak. Kodak used to be the biggest imaging and photographic equipment company in the global market. It made a great success in photographic film age, but when the digital age came, Kodak fell heavily down to the earth. Why? It is not because the lack of technology because it’s Kodak that invented the first digital camera. The reason in essence is that it refused to make a change when all the surroundings were changing. When digital technology spread quickly all over the world, Kodak tended to stay in the quite profitable film industry and made no reaction to the digital trend. It blindly believed that the lifetime of photographic film industry wound not end in the future decade, whereas the fact was almost all the consumers gradually chose to use digital cameras. Finally, the former titan becomes an old man who is fighting for surviving. In contrast, its rival Fujifilm has made a successful transformation and is making a large number of profits. The other point that impressed me a lot is that for future leaders,