Nothing can last forever. When you are big, you are doomed for aging. Empire, dynasty, country, all bow to age.
IMO, keeping your company rich, powerful but small (in terms of the number of products and employees) might last longer. But this seems unrealistic for real business in the real world. Reason is, the undead like AT&T (my colleague always talks about his experience working there and comments the Lab in NJ is a ghost town) will continue to live because of the deep root of AT&T in our American life.
It's a paradox and sarcastic. You either prosper and everyone admires, or you remain undead and disgusted by many. And to both you have to be big...
-- EDIT --
To the commenter:
Most of the empires and dynasty power degraded after 50-100 year. That's the life span of one or two emperors. Almost all of these empires continue to split until full conquer. During splitting, you may have a couple more strong emperors in place. This is like HP splitting, or IBM selling its desktop and laptop division to Lenovo. They are merging or cutting arms to survive.
Roman might be one that last longer before a big split than the rest. In the ancient Chinese history, most dynasties you have heard of would lose dominance and prosperity after about 100 years, mostly due to incompetent leadership. In the case of the Mongolians, they conquered half of the world in less than a decade, but they divided into several ruling regimes to avoid big civil war. The one that controlled ancient China (called Yuan dynasty) went defeated to the Han people in less than a hundred years. The last dynasty in China, the Ching dynasty, did enjoy its dominance for four different emperors, and then rapidly declined due to foreigner invasion, corruption and severe political conflict, and unaccountable spending from the previous administration (plus many social issues).
Interesting focus only on China. Apols I erased my comment but the original point was the political empires seem to last many centuries as oppposed to corporate empires which seem to be at their peak for mere decades.
You make a massive error in your analysis, and that is to limit your perspective to Chinese dynastic political cycles. You ignore the idea of geographic empire building, where there is ample evidence of multi-century empires, and we are not talking only Roman. Also Byzantine, then Ottoman, British, French, and Spanish, not to mention Persian or Zulu. On China, while internal politics mean dynasties come and go, Chinese territorial integrity has been unchallenged for many centuries, testament to the fact that while the individuals, families, dynasties, may come and go, the underlying political structure is very resilient.
In ever single one of my cited cases, the nation-level structure is multi-century in longevity, and beats by an order of magnitude any commerce-driven corporate leadership structure we have ever seen.
So. My point is that corporations as a structure for human interaction/cooperation are deficient in that they are not able to deploy force. Only money. The latter is not long lived without the former.
IMO, keeping your company rich, powerful but small (in terms of the number of products and employees) might last longer. But this seems unrealistic for real business in the real world. Reason is, the undead like AT&T (my colleague always talks about his experience working there and comments the Lab in NJ is a ghost town) will continue to live because of the deep root of AT&T in our American life.
It's a paradox and sarcastic. You either prosper and everyone admires, or you remain undead and disgusted by many. And to both you have to be big...
-- EDIT --
To the commenter: Most of the empires and dynasty power degraded after 50-100 year. That's the life span of one or two emperors. Almost all of these empires continue to split until full conquer. During splitting, you may have a couple more strong emperors in place. This is like HP splitting, or IBM selling its desktop and laptop division to Lenovo. They are merging or cutting arms to survive.
Roman might be one that last longer before a big split than the rest. In the ancient Chinese history, most dynasties you have heard of would lose dominance and prosperity after about 100 years, mostly due to incompetent leadership. In the case of the Mongolians, they conquered half of the world in less than a decade, but they divided into several ruling regimes to avoid big civil war. The one that controlled ancient China (called Yuan dynasty) went defeated to the Han people in less than a hundred years. The last dynasty in China, the Ching dynasty, did enjoy its dominance for four different emperors, and then rapidly declined due to foreigner invasion, corruption and severe political conflict, and unaccountable spending from the previous administration (plus many social issues).