S&P Survival--A Recessionary Update

If you follow Tom Peters, you're probably familiar with his slide on the survival rates of S&P companies and Fortune 100 companies (work done by Foster and Kaplan). The problem I have when I use this slide is that the data are 25 years old (time periods ending in 1987). So, I updated the research using data from S&P companies during the "lost decade" of 1999-2009. What I found was intriguing and resulted in some clear lessons for organizations seeking to survive recessions. Read my work at changethis.com--it's a published article in the August 2011 online edition. The bottom line is that success in a recessionary time is a function of forward-looking management, being in the right markets, and making some critical decisions based on future scenarios, not extrapolating from past performance.