A sensational piece in today’s New York Times by Dick Brass, former vice president at Microsoft between 1997 and 2004, on the continuing struggles at the software giant. Mr Brass worked on the company’s unsuccessful attempts to develop popular tablet PCs and e-books. You might think he is writing out of bitterness and disappointment. But he offers a measured (and fascinating) commentary on the difficulty big, successful companies have in changing to adapt to new times.
This is one of the reasons why the mighty fall. We are currently seeing another example of this at Toyota. I shall write at greater length about this topic in my next Tuesday column.
But here is an initial thought to be getting on with. The management writer Charles Handy urges us to think about our own lives in terms of an S or “sigmoid” curve, which represents the struggle, growth and decline life-cycle which most of us, and most companies, are on. The trick is to start something new while you are still at the height of your powers, and before inevitable decline sets in. That way you can remain a high performer in some activity, even as you start to tail off in another.
Toyota’s problems are rather different, I think, and have to do with complacency and cutting corners. But Microsoft is a classic example of a business that still lives off its killer product, Windows, without ever quite coming up with anything even half as lucrative.
Whether at the personal or the corporate level, we have to become as adaptable “as change itself”, as Gary Hamel says.
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
