We are in 2040, at the exhibition: ”Extinct Companies from the last decade”.
The first wave who didn’t make it: The obvious ones
- Companies who ignored the energy transition.
- Companies who skipped Industry 4.0.
- Companies addicted to single-use plastics.
- Companies who underestimated AI.
- Companies that treated cybersecurity as “IT’s problem”.
And last but not least:
- Companies that assumed the future would resemble the past.
4 examples:
- The Energy Dinosaurs:
They believed fossil-based production could remain untouched until “someone else” solved the transition.
Their costs exploded, their customers left, regulation suffocated them.
They didn’t die suddenly; they just slowly ran out of relevance. - The Industry 4.0 Skeptics:
They waited for digitalization to “mature.”
Meanwhile, competitors automated, interconnected, and accelerated past them.
By the time they wanted to start, the talent and investment required were tenfold. - The Plastic Addicts:
They thought sustainability was a branding exercise, not an operational necessity.
Regulation, consumer pressure, and raw material constraints proved otherwise.
Their business model simply became illegal. - The AI Deniers:
They treated AI as a buzzword while others treated it as fuel.
In just two years, productivity gaps became impossible to bridge.
They didn’t lose because of AI, they lost because of their fear of transformation.…
The Second Wave: The Surprises No One Saw Coming
These companies are different. Their failures were not inevitable, yet they happened because critical factors were left unaddressed:
- Decision Paralysis at the Top:
– Leaders who kept discussing scenarios instead of designing them.
– Companies where every decision required consensus, and markets that no longer waited. - The Underinvestment Trap:
– Not enough capacity. Not enough talent. Not enough change momentum.
– They optimized themselves into fragility.
– Their competitors invested into resilience. - The Culture of “Good Enough”:
– They weren’t bad companies.
– They were comfortable companies.
– And comfort is the first step toward decline. - The Invisible Competitors:
– Startups, cross-industry entrants, tech-enabled micro-players, none of them were on the radar in 2025.
– By 2030, they owned the business.
The biggest factor:
Leadership was not ready for Perma-Change
The companies that disappeared didn’t lack strategy. They lacked adaptation speed…
Read more about AchieV’s Perma-Change:
