Managing for Success: Spotting Danger Signals – And Fixing Problems before They Happen

Description

The damage that incompetent managers do is incalculable. Every year they wipe tens of billions off the value of companies around the world. But the routinely incompetent behaviour that leads to failure is often covered up, incompetent managers are paid off and the causes of failure are swept under the carpet. Yet, most of these failures could have been avoided if only we knew how to spot the signs of incompetence in advance, and take steps to prevent it happening. Prevention is always better, and cheaper, than cure. Morgen Witzel tackles the problem of incompetence in the round by exploring the political, cultural, psychological and personal factors that lead to incompetency at every level of business. Arrogance, excessive reliance on formal plans and metrics, lack of professional pride, and poor and misguided business education and training are among the problems that drag businesses down. Using international case studies from Ford Motor Company, Royal Ahold and Lehman Brothers, practical solutions are provided for avoiding incompetence by changing the culture within organizations and the ways in which managers are trained and developed to truly manage for success and minimise failure. Cover Contents List of Tables Acknowledgements 1 Ludicrous, but unavoidable Incompetence and failure Five dangerous faults Prevention rather than cure Managing for success A personal note 2 No defects but our own: Ford Motors The rising star Pride before the fall Our Ford 3 How the mighty fell: Lehman Brothers A century of service Change of culture Downfall What went wrong? 4 Masters of the universe FIGJAM Look on these works, ye mighty, and despair We’ve always done it this way (part 1) So long as it is black Titanic syndrome The road to corporate hell Cultures of mindless self-belief The paradox of pride and humility 5 Deer caught in the headlights Black swans and inflection points Where angels fear to tread The poverty of imagination Path dependence The past is a foreign country The ignorance of ignorance Cultures of unthinking action Putting knowledge at the heart of everything 6 The unhealthy yearning for precision The mirage of certainty Obsessive-compulsive planning disorder The danger of strangers Violent politeness Cultures of anxious precision Only the paranoid survive 7 The Creosote syndrome Growth and death The deluded obsession with profit The even more deluded obsession with market share The myth of competition Greed and corruption Cultures of conspicuous acquisition Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out money isn’t everything 8 Lust in action Sex, lies and the Internet The urge to dominate Column inches The bureaucratic glutton Cultures of selfish domination Three reasons why self-control is a really good idea 9 The curse of Descartes We’ve always done it this way (part 2) You can’t manage what you can’t measure The ditch and the stars Only if the spreadsheet says so PowerPoint makes us stupid Cultures of linear logic Does it weigh the same as a duck? 10 Nobody cares The wrong people in the wrong jobs Corporate bullshit-itis Above my pay grade Blame and denial Social loafing and nodding dogs Detachment and cynicism Ethical collapse What is a business for? 11 The leaning tower of academe How business schools turned away from the light The fracturing of management thought Are experts necessarily revealers of truth? Inherently annoyed 12 High noon in the garden of good and evil Shouting at imaginary dogs The first duty of management Appendix 1 Warning flags Index