How Vital Companies Think, Act, and Thrive

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“How do you keep the vitality of day one, even inside a large organization?” — Jeff Bezos

Leadership has its benefits—scale, knowledge, influence, and financial stability among them. But our research shows that as companies age and grow, incumbents increasingly focus on internal matters, have more difficulty freeing themselves from legacy businesses and approaches, and progressively shift their priorities toward running—rather than reinventing—the business. Nontraditional competitors, disruptive technologies, and new business models are making corporate reinvention a critical priority.

 

How can legacy leaders remain vital—to preserve and develop their capacity for growth, risk taking, innovation, and long-term success? In creating a quantitative measure of corporate vitality and its underlying drivers, we hope to provide a working framework of what matters when managing the balance between delivering near-term execution and investing in the future. The drive to maintain vitality has organizational, financial, and cultural levers—all of which reinforce each other.

VITALITY: A NECESSITY FOR LONG-TERM GROWTH

The challenge is straightforward: growth is critical for sustained value creation. In the short term, companies can create value by optimizing costs or assets or by building investors’ expectations. Yet in the long run, most value creation comes from top-line growth, which accounts for 74% of total shareholder return of S&P 500 top-quartile-performing companies over a ten-year period.

The good news is that achieving sustainable growth is still possible for today’s incumbents. Approximately 10% of large US companies are growing at double-digit rates.  Among that 10%, many—such as Visa and Mastercard (credit cards), Hilton (hotels), Constellation Brands (alcoholic beverages), and O’Reilly (auto parts)—are from nontech industries. What is their secret?

In today’s rapidly changing environment—with elevated political, social, and technological uncertainty—what will make a company thrive tomorrow is different from what makes it succeed today. Current performance is less and less predictive, and an overreliance on backward-looking metrics can be deceptive. Many of today’s large incumbents are vulnerable, even if they have a solid track record of past performance.

And abrupt failures happen increasingly frequently—think Kodak or Blockbuster—in no small part because of the risk of digital disruption. Even when their positions seem comfortable, incumbents need to create a sense of urgency and preemptively address the requirements to sustained success. They must develop their capacity for growth and reinvention. This is what we call vitality.

We are able to measure vitality by using BCG’s proprietary methodology behind the Fortune Future 50—the result of a two-year research partnership between BCG and Fortune magazine. This index ranks the most vital US-listed companies. To build it, we collected all theories purporting to explain the ability of a company to grow and we associated them with measurable variables. We then tested those theories against historical data and only kept the variables that had a measurable and robust impact on long-term revenue growth. As expected, the age and size of a company have a negative impact on growth—confirming that the more established the incumbent, the harder it is to remain vital.

Authors: Martin Reeves, Gerry Hansell, and Rodolphe Charme di Carlo

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