Young organizations often lack esta

Young organizations often lack established role structures or trained personnel; they lack stable relations both among personnel and with external stakeholders; and they often lack sufficient slack resources to weather lean times. At the other end of the life cycle, because
organizations are more open than biological systems, they have a greater capacity
to delay death-to incorporate replacement resources into the maintenance
and repair of their structures. Empirical evidence strongly supports the negative
relation between organizational age and death. Carroll (1983) reviewed models
of death rates across fifty-two data sets involving populations of retail stores,
manufacturing firms, and craft and service organizations, finding that death
rates declined with age in most of these populations (for other reviews, see
Baum, 1996: Table 2; Baum and Amburgey, 2002)