1637
n
Making far-reaching decisions
anything unexpected in your way. You won’t be able to navigate
around – let alone take advantage of – the opportunities and
obstacles that suddenly appear on the road ahead.
“Today’s fast-changing business environment”? The
same as it ever was!
But let’s not exaggerate things. Sure, in most businesses there
is competition, and in most businesses there is ample change.
But most (if not all) “business thinkers” seem to not tire of
proclaiming that the world is changing ever faster – and I am just
not sure I am buying it.
Because you must have read it somewhere too: “Today’s business
environment is characterized by increasingly high levels of
uncertainty and change” – or something like that. Half the
articles in popular management magazines seem to start with a
sentence like that. And, I have to admit, it annoys me. Deeply.
“In today’s fast changing business world . . .”, “many industries
are increasingly characterized by rapid change”, “high velocity
environments”, “increasing hypercompetition”, and so forth and
so forth, blah blah, blah blah.
I know, it is slightly pathetic that something like this annoys me,
but it does. I guess it annoys me because people simply accept it
as a given, as the truth. But is the current business environment
really so much more turbulent than it was when the world
computerized, or when the Berlin Wall came down, or when
electricity was invented? Somehow, I doubt it. But still, people
always say that “the world of business is becoming increasingly
volatile” (without showing me any evidence).
Fortunately, my fellow strategy professor Gerry McNamara, from
Michigan State University, and two of his colleagues were equally
annoyed but (in contrast to myself) did something about it. They
analyzed the nancial performance of about 5,700 companies
over a period of more then two decades, looking at measures
such as performance stability, market stability, abnormal business
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