Large companies have fallen out of favor. It is now widely assumed that the very characteristics that underpinned their success—scale, stability, consistency—are hindrances to competing in today’s fast-paced markets. To avoid being displaced by small, entrepreneurial upstarts, the thinking goes, big companies will have to learn how to mimic those upstarts. They must, in the words of Gary Hamel, “bring Silicon Valley inside” or they will die.
A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review.