Читать книгу Growing Pains - Flamholtz Eric G. - Страница 11

It is well established that approximately 50 % of all new ventures will fail within five years. For every Southwest Airlines that succeeds, there is a People Express that goes bankrupt. For every Facebook, there is a Myspace that was once popular, but that is now an afterthought. For every Starbucks, there is a Diedrich Coffee that failed. For every Dell, there is an Osborne Computer (who very few people even remember – even though it reached $100 million in sales revenue in three years before going bankrupt, and was a leader in personal computers prior to the founding of Dell).

It is a great achievement to create a successful start-up, given their 50 % failure rate. It is an even greater challenge to create a company that is sustainably successful over “the long run.” As we view it, the long run relates to sustainable success over several decades. At a minimum, it involves success over at least two generations of company leaders. In sports such as baseball, basketball, or football, it is possible to have sustained success with a specific group of players and a single coach; but true “sustainable success over the long run” exists only when leadership has passed from generation to generation with sustained success. One company that has achieved this is General Electric (GE). Founded in 1878, GE continues to be a global leader. Another is Heineken, the Netherlands-based beer company. Heineken was founded in 1864, and also continues to be a world leader in its space. A third is Toyota. Toyota, focused on the production of automobiles, was founded in 1933 as a department of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, which itself traces its history to 1926. Toyota Motors was created as a spinoff from the parent company as Toyota Motor Company in 1937.

Sustainable success for a long period is very challenging, but possible, as shown by GE, Heineken, and Toyota. It is difficult even over a relatively shorter period such as 15 years. A comparison of companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange from 2000 to 2015 shows that there were significant changes in the composition of the top listed companies by “market cap” (market capitalization, the standard measure of a public company's value).2 Only three companies were in the top 10 on both dates: Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. Several companies that were listed as among the top 10 in 2000 were no longer on the list in 2015, including Dell, Sun Microsystems (purchased by Oracle), JDS Uniphase, and Yahoo!.