NAVEEN G

A chorus of business commentators has declared the “end” of the conglomerate in 2021, pointing to recent decisions by corporate behemoths such as General Electric and Toshiba to split into smaller, more focused companies. No, that’s not the case. In reality, the real conglomerates — the ones that gave rise to the term in the postwar U.S. — perished many years ago. That they went the way of the dinosaurs is understandable: These chimerical corporations took diversification to levels that make today’s giants look laser-beam focused. Today’s corporate downsizings, then, don’t represent the end of anything. They’re just a faint echo of something that happened 50 years ago.