Better to Burn Out…

10 responses to “Better to Burn Out…”

1. 

   Jonathan Ruff

   Aug 9, 2010 at 7:19 am

   Interesting stuff, except the companies / cities comparison. I’d say his statement is highly inaccurate.

   I’d argue that companies and cities die or shrink for almost exactly the same reasons. Technology shifts (where the railroads came or went, so went prosperity or the lack thereof); the leadership choices of a select few at the top of the food chain (good or bad policy); culture, demographics and fads (one decade it’s popular to be in the Pacific Northwest, the next LA the next Florida or Philly or NYC etc) – one decade it’s cool to shop at JC Penny’s, the next it’s not; one decade Windows is cool, as it smites IBM, then later it’s not as technology shifts (cue up Sony being cool one decade, Apple the next).

   It’s clear that cities die or shrink just as often as corporations do. I’m not sure this guy has ever paid attention to the number of ghost towns that roll up after various economic booms. Have him look up Pithole PA, or Deer Park MD – both of which used to house economic booms; one decade Presidents are visiting Deer Park, a few later, it barely exists. The speaker might argue that cities rarely completely vanish, but that’s basically true of the larger incorporated companies as well, they tend to be eaten or otherwise consumed in pieces by other corporate entities. The big difference is the physical geolocation monopoly that a city holds over an area, that by itself goes a long ways toward ensuring a city is always at the same spot and identifiable in one form or another (which is why we can point to ghost towns in the first place); corporations on the other hand can be consumed and melded in forms, one minute located in NYC the next in LA.

   The corporate era is roughly 200 years old at this point. The oldest of corporations so far have lasted every bit as long as our relevant US cities. Standard Oil still thrives in the belly of Exxon; Sears was founded in 1886; Yuengling has been brewing since 1829! And then of course there are countless European companies that have been around for much longer, several hundred years in various forms etc. As it stands, it’s entirely conceivable that Detroit will be America’s first mega ghost town, as went GM so went our country in fact.

   Reply
2. 

   gsikich1

   Aug 9, 2010 at 10:27 am

   All we have to do is look back at history and how many cities that have been discovered abandoned – Aztecs, Incas, Romans, Egyptians, etc. It is a long, long list. But, then again, people have very short term memories.

   Reply
3. 

   Resh B.

   Aug 9, 2010 at 6:05 pm

   As a former Architect and student of Urban Design, this is such a fascinating thought – comparing cities and companies and connecting it with metabolism analogy.

   This topic reminded me of another old (and probably not completely accurate) comparison – Desmond Morris’ "The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo."

   Reply
4. 

   TomiTapio

   Aug 9, 2010 at 8:16 pm

   What does that tell about 100-person towns?

   Reply
5. 

   jurvetson

   Aug 10, 2010 at 12:18 am

   Good points…. I wonder if he had a high population threshold in mind when referring to cities as relatively everlasting… And if you look up the definition of a city on Wikipedia, you get a wonderful tautology:
   "A city is a relatively large and permanent urban settlement."
   So he is correct by definition. 😉

   To be fair, if you say a company "survives" after it is acquired and relocated, so too do the boom town people who move on to some other place.

   Personally, i think companies are increasingly ephemeral because the drivers of disruptive change are accelerating. If might be interesting to compare the survival rates of similar scale organizations. I would imagine the average 100-person town outlives the average 100-person company (if you consider relocation or reincorporation in both cases as a terminus). Same for 1000, and 1 million (although there are only four companies with 1M+ employees)

   Reply
6. 

   Astrocatou

   Aug 10, 2010 at 2:19 am

   [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/]

   I can think of a LOT of companies with 1M+ employee’s;
   US Military
   US Govt
   etc,etc.
   Large cities are bad for the environment…period.
   You can have excellence and creativity ANYWHERE…

   Reply
7. 

   jurvetson

   Aug 10, 2010 at 2:22 am

   I hope we don’t mistake those for companies. The U.S. Post Office has the most employees of all, but it’s also not a company.

   Geoffrey’s research is aimed at exactly that presumption, that cites are bad for the environment:

   “While most of us imagine idyllic rural America as the epitome of sustainable living, conventional wisdom is exactly backward. Cities are bastions of environmentalism. People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities. Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises. The researchers also found that as cities got bigger, each individual got more productive. A doubling of population led to a more than doubling of creative and economic output.”
   (excerpts from SEED, July 2007)

   Cities are also what environmentalist Stewart Brand sees as one of the three major forces that will save humanity: "Cities draw people away from subsistence farming, which is ecologically devastating, and they defuse the population bomb.." (WIRED, 9/29/09)

   More Stewart Brand thoughts about cities here, with video:

   "Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is going massively and unstoppably urban… Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. This is a tipping point. We’re becoming a city planet. Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold. When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/women, and keeps right on dropping… The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.” So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe."

   I have never lived in a city, but I hear they are all the rage…. =)

   And I agree with you on the excellence and creativity point, especially in this networked world.

   Reply
8. 

   Astrocatou

   Aug 10, 2010 at 2:51 am

   True….I suppose heating my house all winter in Ontario…
   (2K$ in oil each winter…which I wince as I admit…)
   is madness when compared to a shared dwelling of some sort…

   Maybe growing up on a farm makes me nostalgic….
   But then we burned garbage in an oil drum…!!
   etc

   Reply
9. 

   photon~wave

   Aug 10, 2010 at 3:48 am

   Several good points here. Let me post some other quotes from West

   about cities: "When you look at infrastructure in cities you find a similar economy of scale as manifested in networks of living organisms: the bigger the city, the less roads, electrical cabling, etc are needed per capita to sustain its growth. However, for socioeconomic quantities with no simple analogue in biology, those associated with wealth creation, innovation and creativity, the bigger the city, the more there is per capita. We call this super-linear scaling. In a big city, you generally get higher wages, are wealthier, and have more innovative people around you, but you also get more crime, pollution and disease, all to the same degree. The good, the bad and the ugly come as an integrated package"

   about companies: "As corporations grow, they eventually behave much like living organisms; death and decline are part of the process. So here’s the speculation: when a company is formed, it is driven by open-ended, innovative ways of thinking – not overly concerned with economizing – and many may die quickly because of that. But those that survive and flourish eventually become increasingly dominated by bureaucratic and administrative issues as they grow in size. Driven by economies of scale rather than ideas and innovation, the company eventually dies."

   -extracted from interview in Alliance magazine (1 June 2010)

   By the way, for those who love math, i recommend to browse the original PNAS article (2007). Interestingly, the authors find that successive cycles of superlinear innovation reset the singularity and postpone instability and subsequent collapse. Also, the paper allows us discriminate facts from speculations.

   Reply
10. 

    lifeisagameto

    Apr 4, 2016 at 3:55 am

    Can’t be entirely true. My parrot’s heart beats pretty fast and they’re said to live nearly 100 years.

    Reply