One metric I’ve always kept at the back of my mind is the lifespan of a typical company. In the 1930’s, a typical S&P 500 company had an average lifespan of about ninety years. Fast forward to 2018, it’s about seventeen years. The central question in addressing this issue should be, is your metabolic rate as an organisation fast enough? A book that addresses this concern for me is definitely, “The Constraints of Corporate Tradition” written by Alan Kantrow in 1987. His arguments are premised on the fact that corporate culture needs to be more flexible, and explains how to take advantage of past experiences. Kantrow’s latter position is what I will focus on.

In the last thirty-two years, forty-seven airlines in Nigeria have gone underground and the challenge can be attributed to policy formulation, policy deviation and policy contradictions on the part of the executive arm of government. After all of these serial failures, what have we truly learned? Up until today, have the government paid the workers of the defunct airline their remuneration? Has there been any postmortem to ascertain what went wrong and plans that have been put in place to forestall a future reoccurrence? Do we have the requisite high-end talents (Pilots, Aeronautical Engineers etc.) needed to run a functional airline? We failed twice in this millennium in the national carrier business. Continue Reading