Today's post is a direct quote from Peter Drucker.
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems. Only the fairy story ends, "They lived happily ever after."
It is not easy for the management of a successful company to ask, "What is our business?" Everybody in the company then thinks that the answer is so obvious as not to deserve discussion. It is never popular to argue with success, never popular to rock the boat.
The ancient Greeks knew that the penalty for the hubris of success is severe. The management that does not ask "What is our business?" when the company is successful is, in effect, smug, lazy, and arrogant. It will not be long before success will turn into failure."
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sort of like the Peter Principle... but on an organization-wide level. A company is successful until it rises to it's own level of incompetence. It's interesting to note that a lot of times founders leave the companies they've started voluntarily because they know that the skills to start something are different than the ones to grow it past a certain level. They recognize their own limitations, that they possess one skill set and not the other. A lot of these individuals go on and start up other successful companies (for instance Paul Allen (the lesser) of Ancestry.com and now FamilyLink.com fame). Some individuals do possess both sets but it is rare to see.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge is recognizing when that change needs to happen and it's hard to see, especially from within.