LEADING THROUGH THE INTELLIGENCE AGE SERIES (PART 3)
The world is being rewired in real time, and most organizations are not built for it. So it is worth asking a blunt question: how many businesses have actually survived, and thrived, for more than a century? The honest answer is not many, and the ones that have do not look random.
In Japan, home to some of the oldest continuously run companies on earth, there are 21 firms older than a thousand years and 147 older than five hundred. Only 52 of the original 1955 Fortune 500 companies still exist in anything like their original form. The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has collapsed from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 years today, and Innosight’s longevity research projects it will fall to around 12 years by 2027. (Innosight, Corporate Longevity Forecast; American Enterprise Institute, 2020)
We are not looking at outliers who got lucky. We are looking at an extinction event, and a small number of survivors.
The Pattern Behind the Survivors
Researchers who have spent decades studying “Century Club” companies keep landing on the same short list of traits: a mission and culture that predates any single leader, deep long-term relationships with partners, employees and the local community, and a tightly protected core of unique strengths combined with a genuine willingness to change everything around that core.
Vicki TenHaken’s decade-long study of Japanese and American centenarian firms, and Iwasaki and Kanda’s research on ninety Japanese SMEs ranging from 100 to nearly 1,300 years old, both identify the same five factors: strong corporate mission and culture, unique core strengths paired with active change management, close long-term relationships with business partners, long-term employee relationships, and deep roots in the local community. (TenHaken, Lessons from Century Club Companies; Iwasaki & Kanda, 1996)
The pattern is almost paradoxical: these firms survive centuries precisely because they refuse to be frozen in time, while protecting the one or two things that make them who they are. Continuity of identity, not continuity of structure, is what carries a firm across generations.
Small Is Not a Handicap. It Is the Mechanism.
Here is the part large organizations do not want to hear: agility scales down, not up. Small firms are not agile because they try harder. They are agile because they carry less.
A 2019 empirical study on strategic agility in SMEs found that the real estate, headcount and sunk IT investment that make large firms powerful are also what limits how fast they can move. Separately, research from the U.S. Small Business Administration and USPTO on patenting activity found that firms with fewer than 25 employees produce more patents per employee than any other size category, and that their patents score higher on originality and citation impact than those from large corporations. (Journal of Small Business Strategy, 2019; USPTO, Patenting by Small Firms)
Smallness, in other words, is not a stage a company grows out of on its way to relevance. In a fast-moving environment, it is often the mechanism that keeps a company relevant at all.
Why This Is Even More True in South East Asia
If agility is a structural advantage everywhere, it is close to existential in this region. Small and medium enterprises are not a marginal sector here. They are the actual economic engine, running on family ownership, local reputation and dense personal networks, the very same “stakeholder closeness” that the Century Club research identifies as a survival trait in Japanese firms four centuries old.
Small and medium enterprises make up between 97 and 99.9 percent of all businesses across the ten ASEAN member states, employ roughly 85 percent of the workforce, and generate somewhere around 40 to 45 percent of regional GDP, depending on the country and the year. (ASEAN Secretariat, Development of MSMEs in ASEAN; Asian Development Bank, Asia SME Monitor, 2024)
South East Asian small firms are not catching up to some Western best practice. In many respects, they are already living what the West is now rediscovering the hard way.
Western Capitalism Is Tired, and It Shows
As growth slows and margins compress, the reflex of large Western capital has not been to out-innovate the disruption. It has been to buy it, or to buy the competitor who might cause it.
Research from Brookings tracking U.S. industry concentration found that more than 75 percent of American industries saw concentration rise over the past two decades, with the number of firms genuinely competing against one another in steady decline in sector after sector. (Brookings, “A Policy at Peace with Itself,” 2018)
Consolidation dressed up as efficiency is still consolidation, and a merged giant rarely innovates faster than the two smaller companies it swallowed. It just controls more of the market in which nobody has to.
Artificial intelligence is now running the same playbook at a faster clock speed. Compute, talent and data are concentrating in the hands of a handful of firms large enough to absorb the capital expenditure, pushing smaller AI players into dependency, alliance or acquisition rather than genuine competition.
Government and civil society tell the identical story from the other side of the ledger. Public AI strategies routinely fail to translate into practice because the underlying structures — procurement, data, workforce skills — go untouched, and nonprofit leaders report the identical stall: initiatives that never scale past isolated tasks because nobody set the direction.
Big tech spent roughly 400 billion dollars on AI data center buildout last year alone, and journalists and analysts have started reaching for a very specific phrase to describe the result: too big to fail. (Marketplace, “Is Artificial Intelligence Becoming Too Big to Fail?”, January 2026)
We watched this exact dynamic play out with banks in 2008. Regulation did not break up the concentration then, it entrenched it. There is no obvious reason to assume AI will end differently unless something structurally different is allowed to compete.
Failure Should Be an Opportunity, Not an Ending
If you intend to play this game in centuries rather than quarters, you have to change your relationship with failure. Ashby put it plainly: nobody knows what to do against the purely new. The organizations that last are not the ones that avoided failure. They are the ones that treated failure as the moment to reinvent the parts of themselves that no longer served the mission, while protecting the core that did.
Large organizations are structurally bad at this.
McKinsey’s own fifteen years of research into corporate transformation, most recently detailed in “Losing from Day One,” found that the success rate for large-scale transformations, meaning initiatives that both improve performance and sustain that improvement, has hovered around 30 percent for over a decade and has not meaningfully moved. Nearly half of the value transformations lose disappears before implementation even starts, in the target-setting and planning phases. (McKinsey & Company, “Losing from Day One,” 2021)
Small firms do not run “transformation programs.” They just change, because they have to, because there is no layer of bureaucracy standing between the decision and the action.
Keeping the Rocks
None of this is an argument for staying small out of fear of growth. It is an argument for keeping the rocks, the mission, the core competency, the relationships that took decades to build, and throwing away everything else that has calcified into “the organization”: the layers, the sign-offs, the transformation decks nobody reads past page three. That is precisely the entrepreneurial reflex large firms lose as they scale, and that small firms in South East Asia have never had the luxury of losing.
This is where The Collaboration Principle comes in. We work with large organizations to help them push the entrepreneurial button again, to rediscover the agility, the closeness to their people, and the willingness to reinvent that they had when they were small enough to have no other choice. Not to make them small again. To help them behave like it, before the alternative is decided for them.
If you recognize this in your organization, we would be glad to have a chat with you.
Antoine Viornery — Founder, The Collaboration Principle
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