Throughout the past decades, we find an increasing inability to grasp the world´s uncertainty, turbulence, rapid change, dynamism, disruption, complexity, hyper-competition, high-velocity markets and flux.
The notion of VUCA - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous - is gaining popularity as a term to cover the various dimensions of this ‘uncontrollable’ environment.

Four Big Disruptive Changes are contributing to the VUCA world:

Following the law of entropy, there is a natural tendency to organisational disorder. As a result, the life span of S&P500 companies has been steadily decreasing over the years: 

16% of companies were able merely to survive in the 1990s.

Creative Destruction, Richard Foster & Sara Kaplan

Being successful today does not guarantee to remain successful in the future. The VUCA world demands a lot more internal change for the better.

Of 1,100 analysed companies with at least 30 years of history, less than 20 had consistently high year-over-year growth during some part of that period.

Bain & Company Analysis

The number of companies remaining in the top quartile of S&P growth is decreasing almost every year.

Based on annual 5-years rolling Sales Growth

"In 70% of the cases, the problem is not a bad strategy but bad execution."

Fortune Magazine

More than 70% of cultural transformations do not achieve the expected results. The primary cause of this failure is change resistance, either from management or individuals.

Source: Adapted from Fortune Magazine

Transformational change is difficult, but a focus on communicating, leading by example, engaging employees, and continuously improving can triple the odds of success. Within organisations that take a rigorous, action-oriented approach to complete their transformation, the success rate rises to 75% — almost three times the average for all transformations.

The success of a transformation does not depend on a few isolated improvement initiatives, but rather on the continuous execution of improvement events at all levels of the organisation. 

Only one company in eight achieved sustained and profitable growth over a decade.

Profit from the Core, Bain & Company

To be successful and remain in business, both profitability and growth are important and necessary for a company to survive and remain attractive to investors and analysts.  Profitability is, of course, critical to a company's existence, but growth is crucial to long-term survival.

In the graph below we can see that is very difficult to grow shareholder returns and reduce revenue at the same time, meaning that downsizing rarely works on the long term. On the other side, few companies are capable of growing revenue and at same time increasing shareholder return. Most companies are not capable of growing profitability independently of growing revenue or not.
The challenge remains to move to the upper right quadrant of the graph, a place few companies can sustainably hold. 

Source: Study of 11,500 manufacturing firms from 1963-2015