Tag: organizational decline

strategy, uncertainty

Should Strategists Take Baths? The Byzantine Empire’s Lesson in Surviving Uncertainty

Why do some organizations survive and thrive while others falter? The question has long been asked, and the proposed answers are many, but one factor that seems to play a very strong role is the ability to maintain a creative connection with the changing reality of one’s environment. A historical example is the survival of the Byzantine Empire.

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decision making, Management, transformation

How declining organizations get used to mediocrity

[version en Français ici]

Companies rarely collapse all at once. The collapse is often only the visible phase of a decline that started long before and developed insidiously. Like the famous frog that does not react when the temperature of the water in which it is placed rises, this slowness makes it more difficult to react: the signs of decline seem disparate and it is difficult to link them together to build a picture of danger. At the heart of this difficulty is the silence about the situation within the organization, and the tacit acceptance of mediocrity.

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Management, transformation

The Creosote, this High-Performing Manager Who Destroys Your Organization

One of the major factors in the decline of organizations is the type of managers they hire and promote. Among them is what I call the “creosote manager,” the one who kills the life around him in order to thrive. Creosote people populate just about every organization I encounter that has so much trouble innovating. Wouldn’t there be a causal relationship?

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innovation

Organizational exhaustion… and internal exile

I wrote earlier about the loss of creative ability of the firm. This loss and the growing reliance on a command and control management style are obviously not without impact for an organization. In his political essay “The Power of the Powerless”, Vàclav Havel writes about a simple everyday experience he had in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. In the window of a local grocery store, he observed a poster of the Communist party that read: “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel asked himself,  “Why does the grocery manager do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?” Obviously, the greengrocer was not a communist militant (in that era there were not so many around).

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