This is also the first year that I've regularly had senior executives and C-suites (as opposed to tech) ask me about agile as a qualifying or competitive factor. I'm always nervous when process becomes a qualifier (due to the "best practices are no magic bullet" expectations management it requires, often in the face of the competition's unwarranted claims), but I'm happy to see plenty of F100+s thinking about how to effectively innovate within their core markets without throwing $20m waterfalls at the problem.
Now we work with a lot of enterprises, most of whom by employee headcount outnumber us by 10-100x : 1. We can't boil the ocean. We have to do it a piece at a time.
Often the C-suite are converted after just a few visits to our offices, or after talking to our various office directors (nearly all of whom have come from frontline engineering, product management or design). And typically the engineers, product managers and designers we work with are quick to see the benefits too.
But these companies are very large and sometimes the incentives are highly heterogenous across different individuals and departments. But slowly, surely, they change. And even when they don't completely change, it only takes an isolated pocket of fast movement to keep a large company in the game against disruptors.
That said, we've found that after a while, the ideas and practices begin to spread by themselves. A good example is The Home Depot, with whom we've had several Labs engagements now. Cody, from THD, even gave a tech talk about our NYC office about the experience: http://original.livestream.com/pivotallabs/video?clipId=pla_...
Unfortunately, we flubbed the audio, so Cody is a little hard to hear, but if you can hear -- it's a great story.
Assuming they just sit still, sure. But large companies aren't uniformly run by Hollywood stereotypes.
More importantly: Large companies don't need to be better than startups to crush them. They have the depth of finance to sustain a brutal fight.
They only have to be good enough to hold the line. Attrition will do the rest.
Add to which, a lot of F1000 companies have decided that disrupting their existing F1000 competitors seems like a jolly good wheeze and have been studying up on this hunky-funky agile and lean thing.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal and in Pivotal Labs, we've seen a massive surge in interest from F500s who want to learn to dance. Some of them are quick studies, too.