Marcus Leung's Blog

When a certain firm is described as disruptive, lean, and agile, and when their culture is said to be innovative and proactive, the typical firm that usually comes to mind is a start-up. This comes with the notion that entrepreneurs and new-business owners are always looking for improvement, where stakes are low, and the company is always about delivering a product to the consumer. But that was so ten years ago.

Today, those same aforementioned corporate qualities and cultures are no longer solely attributed to start-ups, but are slowly becoming an all-too common theme for large, established corporations. According to an article by Forbes, this trend is alive and well, and has taken even the most established business ethos by storm. It mentions how blue-chip companies such as IBM, Unilever, and LG Electronics have all revamped business practices within their respective divisions in order to operate in a more agile manner, effectively creating innovative business solutions.

This new mentality of large companies adopting a start-up mentality really intrigues me. I think that through this cultural pivot in business practice, we’ll start to see more firms acting with quicker, more-streamlined processes. Furthermore, it’s fascinating to consider how the emergence of this mentality today will affect the corporate structures of tomorrow. It seems highly plausible to me that the obsolescent, cumbersome stigma of large businesses will soon become an afterthought to a new hybrid form of company culture and process.

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