The emergence of the megacorporation

A quick post from me to share a little piece of analysis I did today about the grow of corporations. I've been interested for a while in the effects of tech' superpowers on the structure of adjacent markets. My thesis is that in response to their influence, companies will consolidate to create superpowers with the buying power to compete on a more even footing.

As part of my test of this thesis I've looked at the growth of the largest corporations over the last 10 years. The results are fascinating.

The schematic shows that the average revenues of a top-10 US corporate more than doubled from 2000 to 2011. Set against this, GDP grew 50% in the same period.

I'd expect a snowball effect to occur in the next decade, where the spending power of these corporations massively outpaces that of smaller companies and thereby leads to huge inorganic global growth.

Set against these US corporate giants will be new emerging players from the East. Globally, six of the top ten corporates by revenue are from outside the US and three are from Asia.

So there we are. The megacorp' is getting more "mega". I await the long-forecast dystopian future.

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Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

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Chief Strategy Officers II - Career Development

Here's a follow up to my earlier post on the starting point of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) careers in the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies - a visualisation of two steps in their careers: their first employer or job and the job they had before they got their current position. Lots of work went into this... so any insights that you glean from the visualisation would be great to hear about :). The CSO is a crucial strategic role on the executive (!) and the owner of the tone and philosophy of decision making across much of the business, knowingly or unknowingly. Scrutiny of their experience in defining the process and language of strategic management is therefore appropriate not just amongst their executive peers, but in my view amongst shareholders. The days when being very smart and able to analyse large amounts of data were enough to be a CSO are basically gone... has the profession moved on enough to cope?

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