How Much Has Business changed?

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

At Startup Istanbul 2017, we had the honor of welcoming Sam Mallikarjunan who is currently a university professor at Harvard University. He also worked with HubSpot. He helps people learn how to speak, especially entrepreneurs so that they know how to convince their clients. Also, helps with consulting, and teaching.

Sam Mallikarjunan compared the world of business and entrepreneurship to the time of Dinosaurs. These animals were very strong when they existed, no one was able to defeat them, or go against them. However, as strong as these Dinosaurs were, they went through extinction, and just disappeared like that, without being able to confront anyone or go against anyone as well. They just disappeared on their own. That is exactly what businesses are going through these days according to Mr. Sam Mallikarjunan.

The ones among those businesses that are going to be able to survive are not the ones who are able to make a huge profit and achieve all their goals. They are rather those businesses and companies that are ready to change, and are as adaptable to change as possible.

Mr. Mallikarjunan gave us insights about how much is that change, he mentioned how in the last ten year alone, more than 70% of the companies that make up the United States’ fortune are new, and it was only done during one decade as he stated. Future predictions state that by 2020, 75% of the companies that will be on the Fortune 500 list will be companies that we have never heard of, which means that three out of four companies will be totally new. This is really concerning and worrying about the companies that we have now, and of which we have already heard about.

The really big companies are the ones that are having troubles. It is rather a very bad time to be a big and very successful company, but at the same time, very slow. On the other hand, these are really exciting news for new startups and emerging companies, it rather means that 375 slots on the Fortune 500 list will be free to get, and up for grabs. This would be truly incredible.

The Fortune 500 is an annual list that is combined and assembled by ‘Fortune’ magazine, it ranks the first 500  American companies according to their total revenues for their respective fiscal year. Now, how many years do you think a company could stay on that list? The answer might be a little shocking, but 75 years used to be the average for a company on this top list.

However now, that life span has declined to just 15 years. From 75 years to just 15 years, and it is actually expected that this lifespan will just continue on decreasing until it reaches 5 years. This is not because they are running out of money, there are actually Trillions of Dollars just sitting there waiting to be used. This is mainly due to the change that occurred in the fundamental way of how we work.  The nature of work has gotten harder, more complicated, and we are often more stressed.