Here is an excerpt from an article written by Chris Zook for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Unlike dinosaurs, which had no conscious way to adapt to rapid changes around them, companies and CEOs have a choice. They can focus and simplify their organizations. Or, as happens all too often, they can pursue complex strategies that beget complex organizations and complex processes until they grind to a halt like a Rube Goldberg machine.

It is this complexity, my colleague James Allen and I report in our new book Repeatability, that is the “silent killer of profitable growth,” and the greatest inhibitor of adaptability.

Repeatability was based on a three-year Bain & Company study of enduring profit and relative competitive ability to adapt in a world of increasing velocity and uncertainty. Consider these three statistics from our ongoing analysis:

•  Nearly two-thirds of companies now destroy value. Of the 70,000 companies with market data available, more than 42,000 earned shareholder returns (dividends + stock price appreciation) below inflation. Of course, the ‘great disasters’ of the past two decades were part of this list, such as Vivendi, General Motors, and AOL/Time Warner. But next to those there were thousands of relatively small companies that simply failed to create any value for investors. And those small companies add up: altogether, they destroyed $16 trillion.

•  Only 9% of companies achieved even a modest level of sustained and profitable growth. In the past decade, the percentage of companies achieving even 5.5% real revenue and profit growth and earning their cost of capital has steadily declined. Yet almost every business aspires to do this.

•  Just 100 companies accounted for $10 trillion in net returns. Although most companies failed to earn returns that beat inflation over 20 years, all of the companies we studied combined returned $19 trillion (above inflation) over 20 years. Remarkably, just 100 companies generated more than half of that amount.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Chris Zook is co-head of the Global Strategy Practice at Bain & Company. He is co-author, with James Allen, of his latest book, Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change (HBR Press, March 2012). He is the author of Profit from the Core and an author and co-author of numerous other books and HBR articles, including “The Great Repeatable Business Model,” published in HBR in November 2011.