Massive problems for the ungainly giants
Fortune favours the large, and consolidation among leading companies is inevitable. There is no more firmly held belief in popular thinking about business. In banking and pharmaceuticals, in oil and insurance broking, in the motor industry and telephony, the future is said to lie with a small number of large global players. Chief executives across industry have followed the maxim of Jack Welch, the former General Electric boss, that unless you are number one or two in your industry, you are dead.
There used to be a phrase for it - the aspiration "to be the General Motors of this industry". Not any more. Last week, GM forecast another set of disappointing results: the latest in a 30-year history of disappointing results. The ratings agencies threaten to call its securities junk. The company's market share today is lower than when Billy Durant, its founder, was slogging it out with Henry Ford almost a century ago. But it is not Ford, GM's long-term rival, that has benefited from this fall but Toyota, Hyundai and, prospectively, Shanghai Automotive.
Still, GM survives as an independent company. No one much wants its assets and even less its liabilities: the United Auto Workers union, and the pension and medical benefits of retired employees. Another American icon will soon disappear altogether, as AT&T is swallowed by one of its offspring, SBC.
For most of the twentieth century, AT&T and GM were the most powerful companies in the US. They acquired these positions by overtaking the product of the greatest consolidation of all. For several decades, US Steel was the largest company in the world. It is many years since the company ceased to be a significant force, even in the steel industry.
The failures at GM and AT&T did not happen because these companies were big. GM ran into difficulties because it did not make the cars its customers wanted, because the company was slow to see how preferences were changing and because its production systems could not match the cost levels and reliability achieved by its Asian and European competitors.
AT&T used its market dominance to achieve technical excellence. Then deregulation removed its monopolies and the settlement of an antitrust suit removed its local franchises. Freed to pursue the opportunities it perceived in the convergence of telecommunications and computing, an inspired vision was marred by inept execution. In the company's core telecommunications markets, it was repeatedly outsmarted by upstart rivals.
No, GM and AT&T did not fail because they were big. They failed because they were insufficiently sensitive to consumer requirements, because they responded too slowly to changing market structures, and because their organisations were too bureaucratic to see what nimbler competitors were doing. But all these things were direct consequences of their scale of operations.
We consistently overestimate the power and sustainability of scale in business because the advantages of size are technological and tangible, the disadvantages human and intangible. The disadvantages always seem avoidable - large firms need not become inflexible, divorced from their customers, overloaded by long chains of command and formalised decision procedures. Or so books such as When Giants Learn to Dance would tell us.
But giants do not often learn to dance and when they do the effort quickly exhausts them. The few long-lived giants are either companies that have changed a lot or are in industries that have changed little. General Electric has not so much learnt to dance as to shift venues whenever the band is playing the wrong tune. Its main businesses today, in financial services, aircraft engines and medical equipment, are quite different from the earlier activities that gave the company its name.
Exxon and Shell once relied on "nodding donkeys" to tap oil shale and sold petrol in cans at the roadside. Today they drill beneath the ocean and use modern retailing methods. But competition and market structure has been more stable in oil than in any other big industry.
These businesses are the exceptions in a world of which GM and AT&T are more typical. Aspire to be number one or two. But harbour no illusions that such positions are likely to be sustained.
企业巨人会跳舞吗
命运偏爱大型企业，领先公司之间的重组不可避免。这是人们对企业的坚定看法。在银行、制药、石油、保险经纪、汽车和电信业，人们相信未来属于少数大型全球公司。一直以来，各行业的首席执行官都在笃信通用汽车公司前任总裁杰克?韦尔奇(Jack Welch)的格言，即除非你是所在行业的老大或老二，否则就必死无疑。
曾经有种说法，即立志成为“所在行业的通用汽车”；但这一说法已经过时。上周，通用汽车再次预测一组令人失望的结果，而这样的失望结果已经持续了30年。各评级机构警告要将其证券定为垃圾级。公司目前所占的市场份额，已经低于其创始人比利?杜兰特(Billy Durant)近一个世纪前与亨利?福特(Henry Ford)竞争时的市场份额。但得益于通用汽车衰落的不是其老对手福特汽车，而是丰田、现代(Hyundai)以及未来的上海汽车。
即便如此，通用仍然以一家独立公司的形式存在着。没人想要通用的资产，更别说它的包袱了：“全美汽车工人联合会”(United Auto Workers union)、以及退休员工的养老和医疗福利支出。美国另一家标志性企业“美国电话电报公司”(AT&T)也即将被其后来者SBC电信公司吞并，从而彻底消失。
在20世纪很长一段时间内，AT&T和通用汽车都堪称美国最强大的企业。两家公司都曾参与有史以来最大的重组案，并取得这样的地位。在数十年时间里，美国钢铁(US Steel)也一直是世界上最大的公司。但近些年来，该公司即便在钢铁行业也早已风光不再。
通用汽车和AT&T的失败不在于它们规模巨大。通用汽车陷入困境，是因为其生产的汽车无法满足客户需求，公司无法对客户喜好的改变作出迅速回应，而且其生产系统的成本水平和可靠性也无法与其亚洲和欧洲的竞争对手相抗衡。
AT&T曾一度利用其市场主导地位实现技术卓越。而此后，该公司的市场垄断地位因行业开放政策而告终，其在本地电信服务领域的特许权，也在一场反托拉斯诉讼案中被剥夺。AT&T公司在洞察出电信和计算技术的整合趋势后，欲大力挖掘其中机遇，然而该创意却由于执行不力而受挫。在作为AT&T核心业务的电信市场上，AT&T被行业中后来居上的竞争对手屡次战败。
通用汽车和AT&T的衰落绝不在于公司规模巨大。它们的失败源于对客户需求不够敏感，对市场结构的变化回应过于缓慢，同时还源于其组织机构过于官僚化，难以洞察运营灵活的竞争对手的动向。然而，这一切都是其经营规模直接导致的结果。
人们一贯高估企业规模的力量和可持续性，因为规模的优势体现在技术层面，是可见的；而规模的劣势体现在人的层面，是不可见的。规模的劣势看上去总是可以避免的：大公司不一定要缺乏灵活性、与客户需求脱节、受制于繁冗的指挥环节和规范化的决策程序。至少《巨人学舞》(When Giants Learn to Dance)一书是这么说的。
然而，巨人们并非经常学舞，而且就算学也会很快变得疲乏不堪。少数长寿巨人不是本身改变很多，就是所在行业基本没有改变。通用电气公司未必学了多少舞步，但它擅长在曲调不对头的时候更换场地。该公司当前的主要业务包括金融服务、飞机引擎和医疗设备，与公司早期的业务活动(公司名称的来源)大相径庭。
埃克森(Exxon)和壳牌(Shell)一度利用“点头抽油泵”(nodding donkeys)开采石油岩页，并在路边销售罐装石油。现在，两家公司均在海底钻探开发，并采用现代化的零售模式。然而，石油行业的竞争和市场结构始终比其他任何大型行业更加稳定。
这类企业与通用汽车和AT&T之类更具代表性的企业相比，堪称特例。立志成为业内领袖无可厚非，只是不要心存任何幻想，以为这样的位置能永远保持。
