It’s Good to Be a Big Corporation Again

In the 2000s, a series of academic papers showed that corporate America had become a much less comfortable place for incumbents. Lots of people in corporate America already knew this, but it was helpful to see peer-reviewed evidence: L.G. Thomas and Richard D’Aveni found big increases in profit volatility among manufacturing companies from 1950 to 2002. Diego Comin and Thomas Philippon found a similar increase in the volatility of sales growth and other metrics. Many other studies delivered comparable results.

It had become the “Age of Temporary Advantage,” or of “Hypercompetition,” to filch the titles of an article and a book by D’Aveni, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Or, more familiarly, the age of “disruption,” the term popularized by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen. And it still is, if you read the business press or attend a business conference or come within 100 miles of Silicon Valley.