It is truly amazing to see these legends struggling all at once, as if they had simultaneously suffered an industrial accident. Nonetheless, in capturing an image of broad and coincident decline among several species of onetime dominant creatures, the word works beautifully. The word is a stretch: The three are not extinct, only painfully and wheezingly gasping for breath. In the tough-talking world of big business, moreover, these companies are often called dinosaurs. Yet the three lost a total of $32.4 billion in 1992, more than four times what the 1990-91 Gulf war cost U.S. Had a ranking been compiled in the 1960s of the large companies most likely to succeed, these three might well have headed the list. Sears absolutely ruled retailing the company was bigger in merchandise sales than its next four rivals combined.

GM was then widely suspected of trying to hold its market share down, so as not to rouse the dogs of antitrust. Neither could he have imagined the fading of two other giants of the day, General Motors and Sears Roebuck. Watson could not have dreamed he was foreseeing his own company's future. IBM was at that point a monarch, about to launch its famed 360 family of computers. ''Figures like these,'' said the executive, ''help to remind us that corporations are expendable and that success - at best - is an impermanent achievement which can always slip out of hand.'' The speaker was Thomas J. The rest had failed, been merged out of existence, or simply fallen in size. But by his description, one appears to have been General Electric and the other a predecessor of U.S. industrial corporations in 1900, he said, only two remained in that select company. He talked about the difficulty successful corporations face in maintaining strength and might. (FORTUNE Magazine) – THE YEAR was 1963, the occasion was a prestigious series of lectures at Columbia University's business school, and the speaker was arguably America's most famous chief executive.

Carl and steve dinosaurs