It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?

The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.

And nevertheless they pay out on those policies time and again, providing a lot of social value.

I think upon examination, the folks actually shipping things at those old dinosaurs are by and large unaffected by the constantly changing upper reaches of their org chart, which just becomes a drain on profits.

The real lightbulb moment is when you realize this observation applies to almost all social structures: your school's PTA, government, militaries, large families, etc.

These bigger companies have moats e.g. life insurance is difficult business to get into and disrupt. They also have strategies to acquire smaller companies and to expand in different markets. This essentially allows them to run for a long, long time once their brand is good.

Every day Ford has to build vehicles that at least mostly work. Every year it has to make at least some changes to its line up.

It is not a do-nothing organization lost in paper-pushing. It ships.

I also think that it’s suffering from fewer fit-and-finish issues than the disruptors.

By definition, you want some of those companies to be old and stable. You, by definition, want life insurance companies outlive your policy. You want big car companies to build tanks in an emergency. You want big companies with lots of employees doing whatever to just exist and keep the economy stable. All the “disruption” at the edges are just for show to find the next giants

I work in the insurance biz and we generally don't want to be nimble and follow best practices. That sounds crazy right? Well, best practices change over time, and fads (at least in IT if not all types of mgmt.) are far too common.

Our team has a motto of "avoiding the cutting edge" because we don't want to bleed. We still have mainframes, because the cost of migration is prohibitive. We largely host on-prem though we have some initiatives to see how the various clouds might work for us. But these initiatives have been going on for 5-6 years. Mostly because our CTO doesn't want to miss out on the cool things.

We generally don't do layoffs, 2008 was the first time in the company's history, and that was like .005% of our company staff. We're very conservative, and when you have ten figures under management, you need to be.