Why Organizations Fail

① Fuzzy Vision

Corporate vision and mission don't inspire people; lack of strategic alignment; people don't know where the organization is going and what it is trying to achieve in the future.

Create a Corporate Vision  >>  Shared Vision  ▪  Strategic Intent

② Lack of Leadership Skills

Fear of change; leaders lack entrepreneurial spirit; leadership style on the part of top management is either too directive or too hands-off; managers do not lead, they just administrate and micromanage; weak leadership development program.  >>>

12 Leadership Roles  ▪  Inspirational Leader  ▪  Leadership-Management Synergy

③ Discouraging Culture

No shared values; lack of trust; blame culture; focus on problems, not opportunities; people don't have fun at work; diversity is not celebrated; failures are not tolerated; people lose confidence in their leaders and systems.

No-blame Culture  ▪  Creative Dissatisfaction  ▪  Questioning Culture  ▪  Fun 

④ High Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic organizational structures with too many layers; high boundaries between management layers; slow decision making; too close monitoring of things and subordinates; too many tools and documents discouraging creative thinking; bureaucracy is tolerated.

Get Rid of Bureaucracy  ▪  Examples  >>  GE  /  ABB

⑤ Lack of Initiative

Poor motivation and encouragement; people do not feel their contributions make a difference; management fails to engage the organization effectively; people work defensively and not creatively, they do their job, and are not to empowered to do nothing more.

Take Initiative  ▪  Intrapreneur  ▪  Employee Performance Management

⑥ Poor Vertical Communication

The is no Guiding Principles; people have no clue of the big picture and do not feel that their contributions are important; too much uncertainty; people don't know what top-managers are thinking and planning because managerial communication  is poor.

Educational Failure Stories  >>  Example of a Losing Organisation

⑦ Poor Cross-functional Collaboration

Functional mindset;  silo mentality impedes knowledge sharing, cross-pollination of ideas, and innovation; lack of cross-functional goals and cross-functional collaboration spirit; functional, no enterprise-wide business process management; no cross-functional management committees; lack of or powerless cross-functional teams and business architects capable of building business synergies.

Break Silos  ▪  How To Erect Barriers to Innovation

⑧ Poor Teamwork

No organizational commitment to team culture; lack of shared and worthwhile goals; weak team leaders; team members who don't want to play as part of a team are tolerated; teams are too large; weak intellectual teamwork; lack of shared rewards.  >>>

 Albrecht's Law: Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity.

Synergistic Team  ▪  Team Creativity >> 10 Tips  ▪  Cross-functional Innovation Teams

⑨ Poor Idea and Knowledge Management

Advanced ideation techniques are not adopted; cross-pollination of ideas is not facilitated; no creativity, idea and knowledge management strategies and evaluation systems; "know-it-all" attitude; "not invented here" syndrome.

 INNOBALL  >>  Achieve Much More  ▪  10 KITT