There’s a pervasive trope that people who’ve worked for an extended period in a large company will struggle to adapt to working in a smaller company. Work at a company too long, the theory goes, and you’re too specialized to hire elsewhere. This belief is reinforced by both age bias1 and the reality that few companies continue to win the rounds of reinvention necessary to maintain excellence over time. The pool of once-phenomenal companies is quite large: Yahoo!, Oracle, and VMware, to name a few.
