Category – Business
Reading time – 5 minutes

A company starts as a little bud. Hopeful and energetic. Then it grows and adds layers of flab over itself. Then it looses it’s dream and it slowly looses out to itself.
Biggest enemy of a big company is the big company itself.
Various things that can go wrong are tubulated in this blog.
1. Deviation from brand mission
A brand gives immediate signal to customers about what to expect. A car rental can expand to fleet management business and it is good for its clients.
But if food snack brand like Cheetos starts selling lip balm or colgate tries selling utensils or motorbike starts selling perfumes it contradicts with their brand image.
2. Inability to attract top telent
Top talent wants innovative and free environment to thrive.
3. Getting complacent
As quaterly profits soar, company employees and CEOs get complacent. Company looses hunger to satisfy customers demands at the level they had done earlier.

4. Short term game mindset
They engage in shortcuts to create stellar quaterly results. Aquisitions. Hostile takeovers. Stock buybacks. Cost cutting in R and D. This all leads to slow decline in their brand value.
5. No differentiated products
As companies get fatter they sit and copy others in the marketplace. They lack ‘wow factor’ ; in their offerings. Copycat companies then engage in price war that sends them to mat.
US auto Industry was astonished by Japanese auto makers.
6. Ego
They fail to see advantages in partnerships with smaller firms. This leads to missed opportunities and leverage points.
So when a startup is small and has fire in its belly; it keeps marching and adjusting very fast before growing up into a lazy big giant.
That’s how big companies fall.
#jimcollins #simonsinek #thaler