Why Companies Fail Article in the Atlantic HERE

a friend of mine writes "Thought this was an interesting article on several levels...tho requires wading through. One part seemed tangential to my frustration with artists who don't evolve. Like a big corporation, the very thing that brings them success also seem to asphyxiate them creatively over time:" and i agree*

GM’s stock price has sunk by a third since its IPO. Why is corporate turnaround so difficult and rare? The answer is often culture—the hardest thing of all to change.

"One possibility is that firms don’t change because inertia is in their DNA—indeed, it’s a gene that once made many of them successful. In their 1989 book, Organizational Ecology, Michael Hannan and John Freeman argue that organizations are actually selected for inertia by their environment, and “rarely change their fundamental structural features.” Change is risky, after all, since it definitionally involves doing something that isn’t already working—and even product lines that have grown lackluster still have some customers. Firms that are prone to frequent large changes will probably have more opportunities to kill themselves off with bad choices than firms that resist big changes. "