In January, a leadership note from IMD observed something radical: the average company in the S&P 500 now lasts less than 20 years. Far less than 20 years. In 1964, the average tenure was 33. A generation ago, corporate life could comfortably outlast an executive career. Today, it may not.
This, mind you, this is not a piece about corporate mortality. It is a piece about time.
Strategy, as we still practice it, was designed for a longer clock: five-year plans, ten-year capital cycles, multi-year transformation roadmaps. Governance structures built on the assumption that advantage, once earned, could be defended. That assumption no longer holds.
The most widely cited longevity research projected that average S&P 500 tenure would fall toward 12–15 years by the mid-2020s. We are now in the mid-2020s. The projection has arrived, or something close enough to make the distinction academic. And yet most board packs still assume continuity.
Consider General Electric. For over a century, GE was the embodiment of managerial durability. It survived wars, depressions and technological revolutions. Under Jack Welch (from 1981 to 2001), it became the template for disciplined performance and diversified growth. For decades, it seemed less a company than an institution.
Then the clock changed. The financial crisis exposed structural fragility inside GE Capital. Complexity diluted accountability. The conglomerate logic that once created resilience began to generate inertia. In 2018, GE was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 111 years. By 2024, it had broken itself into three separate public companies.
GE did not disappear. But it had to dismantle itself to remain viable. This was not a theatrical collapse. It was strategic compression. The environment began moving faster than the architecture designed to manage it. That compression is now everywhere.
Radical replaces incremental
Artificial intelligence does not disrupt one industry at a time; it collapses barriers across all of them simultaneously. Product cycles shorten. Competitive entry costs fall. Capital reallocates at speed. Activists intervene earlier. Regulation evolves mid-strategy. The half-life of advantage is shrinking.
We see it not only in index churn but in behaviour. Research from the Reinvention Academy shows that while fewer than half of organisations felt compelled to reinvent every three years in 2018, by early 2024 more than one in five were doing so annually—the fastest cadence yet recorded. Nearly half of those shifts were radical rather than incremental. This is not a corporate drama. It is an adaptation to a shorter clock.
And yet the paradox remains: strategy duration has not meaningfully shortened. We still build ten-year visions anchored in five-year forecasts. We still treat transformation as a programme with an endpoint. We still reward leaders for optimising the present more than redesigning the future.
The problem is not that companies are failing faster. Creative destruction has always been part of market economies. The problem is the mismatch between environmental velocity and managerial tempo.
Disciplined timing
When the environment accelerates but governance does not, decline feels sudden. In reality, it has been compounding for years. If corporate lifespan now hovers somewhere under two decades, the implications are stark. The first five years of complacency are no longer affordable. The middle years must generate new options, not just protect legacy revenue. The final years cannot be spent defending a model whose expiration date has already passed. This is less about survival and more about cadence.
The organisations that endure will not be those with the most detailed long-range plans. They will be those that shorten their strategic half-life — deliberately rewriting assumptions before the market forces them to.
Reinvention, then, is not a dramatic pivot. It is disciplined timing. We are no longer operating on the clock our management systems were built for. The real question for boards is not how to extend their lifespan. It is whether they are willing to accelerate their rhythm. Because in a world where corporate life may not outlast a single executive career, strategy written for stability is strategy written on borrowed time.
Photo: Dreamstime.
