People often say that successful businesses inevitably grow until they take over the world. The trouble is, as an organization gets larger, it becomes optimized for what it does, and the internal bureaucratic inertia becomes impossible to adapt to new business realities. And so it eventually collapses.
How do you explain Microsoft though? Even though they lost the smartphone train they seem to be taking all the right steps under Nadella and seem to be adapting well to all the new market circumstances.
To me it feels that leadership matters more than we give them credit for. It's just that most leadership sucks.
Great question. There's been a boom recently in giant tech companies. I suspect that is attributable to AI being a big productivity booster, which overcomes creeping calcification. For a while.
I agree with you that Nadella has done a spectacular job, and that leadership matters more than most people think it does. I'd call his performance an outlier.
