"Software 2005" Comments and beginning to stream in, I picked up this post at the Sandhill blog where Brian Sommer (CEO of TechVentive, a technology strategy firm.) talks about the 4 themes from the conference, The first one is "Build to Last vs. Build to Flip", this one is based on the keynote by Dr.Goodnight, CEO SAS. It is an interesting post where Brian discusses how companies in the silicon valley are not built for long term plays and provides a brief from the keynote, of how SAS is a "built to last" kind of organisation.

Excerpt:
SAS stood out to many attendees as their management chose to build a company to last (and last). It takes a lot more executive and managerial effort to create a real business with sustaining power than one that can be quickly discarded or foisted onto another firm. The SAS difference can be summarized as:
- SAS sees employees as long-term value producing assets not short-term talent rentals
- SAS creates a work environment that promotes loyalty, productivity, retention and customer intimacy
- SAS management sees their job as enabling the construction of ever-strengthening bonds between the company, its customers and its employees.

The results SAS has achieved are hard to argue: 29 year old firm, multi-billion dollar revenues, superb customer satisfaction, a perennial Fortune magazine best place to work company, etc.

The first thing that came to my head when I read this post was a slide in one of Tom Peters (Blogspheres very own Management Guru) presentations, so I pulled it up , here is the excerpt of the slide.

Slide 1:
Built to Last v. Built to Flip
"The problem with Built to Last is that it's a romantic notion. Large companies are incapable of ongoing innovation, of ongoing flexibility."

"Increasingly, successful businesses will be ephemeral. They will be built to yield something of value -- and once that value has been exhausted, they will vanish." Source: Fast Company (03-00)While searching for this slide, I found a few others that we along the same theme.



Slide 2:
GIGATREND*: The disposable CORPORATION
"As the pace of innovation increases, the useful lifespan of a new product or service decreases -- and so does that of a company. Startups are still good business, but fewer and fewer are built to last." (E.g.: 15 of 23 Cisco acquisitions in 2000 were <3 years old.) - Source: Wired 04.200



Commentary : And the corporation as "an Entity formed for Perpetuity" is ... DEAD. Wired ran a marvelous special issue called "Gigatrends." One of the ten was labeled ... "The Age of the Disposable CORPORATION." To wit: "As the pace of innovation increases, the useful life span of a new product or service decreases -- and so does that of a company. Start-ups are still good business, but fewer and fewer are built to last." (For example, 15 of 23 Cisco acquisitions in 2000 were less than three years old. They were born. They did some cool stuff. And Cisco decided to incorporate that "cool stuff" into its portfolio.)Well this difference in approach is very interesting, more in posts to follow.

Prashanth Rai