Clay Shirky is a New York University lecturer and writer he is teaching and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. In one of his blog posts he talks about the collapse of the great empires of the past: the Mayans, the Romans. They collapsed because they got too big, too complex and couldn’t adapt to a new world and now he believes this is happening again. Although he focuses on media companies and broadcasters, I think you’ll find a lot of things that are relevant to other industries.