We all want to be successful, don’t we? There are certainly many benefits to it: prestige, status, power, money and more! Success we want but it is too easy to forget the old Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang; that for every success we have there is likely to be a corresponding dark side, there are unforeseen and unintended consequences, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Add to that the ultimate issues, as perhaps most brilliantly described in WB Yeats’ poem "What Then?" This poem describes achievement and success piled on each other stanza by stanza as like decade by decade of his life. And at the end of every stanza comes Plato’s ghost with the simple refrain: ‘what then?’ The final stanza runs:
The work is done,' grown old he thought,
'According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'
Yet for all these existential questions we prefer success to living without it. For some people, not having success is inconceivable; it is their very raison d’etre. Why is it, then, that so often organizations in particular reach spectacular successes then fade and die? We have recently with the recession across the world and in the UK had a spate of household names, some organizations virtually a 100 years old, and yet who have ‘like chimney sweepers come to dust’. What are the key factors that are, as it were, the inherent dangers that turn the tide of prosperity backwards?
What I am about to say, six points, concerns organizations foremost, but anyone can see that these apply almost equally to the individual. Ask yourself – is this me, is this my organization? And if so what am I going to do about it!
First, successful practices that built the organization up are crying out to be codified, to be enshrined in writings, in policies and procedures and laws about ‘this is the way we do things here’. This has two potent adverse effects: first, it requires an army of people who are employed to produce, effectively, paperwork. This is pure cost, not revenue. But more significantly still: what were once informal procedures have now become rigid policies – creativity and innovation are thus inexorably driven out. Creativity itself, incidentally, becomes something to legislate for. When bodies become rigid, they become dead.
Second, with the increasing army of non-productive people working within the organization, the focus becomes more internally-driven, and external threats are ignored. A collective group-think emerges in which what is going on internally is clearly identified as more important than what is going on in the market.
This leads, then, to arrogance and complacency and a sense that competitive problems are only temporary and minor inconveniences rather than issues that need to be addressed strategically and coherently.
Arrogance produces its own rich fruit: complexity and an obsession with internal politics. A preservation of one’s own power becomes not only the primary objective of senior staff but of middle management. One of the most spectacular examples this occurred at the end of the Second World War – Hitler was dead, and defeat was imminent, and yet Hitler’s top echelon were still jostling for position, as if, as Germany faced Armageddon, that were important! But we see the same thing in organizations all over the world.
Fifth, a deep conservatism kicks in that is pre-eminently risk-averse; this is the antidote to entrepreneurialism and the creativity and energy so necessary to all great organizations and, for that matter, empires and civilizations. People begin to believe that taking risks is foolish and so they stand still, no progress is made; and the task of leadership is forgotten: to make remaining in the status quo appear to be more risky than venturing into the unknown.
Finally, new learning is disabled. For a start off, they already have – courtesy of the codification – incorporated all the learning they need into their rules and regs; there’s hardly space for new stuff. New insights are, then, bypassed and not incorporated into organizational memory. Without new learning organizations attempt to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s intelligence. Very large organizations have lots of resources but even they cannot do this for very long; for the competition who is learning is stealing their lunch and their nutrition and their best staff on a daily basis.
Thus it is that being successful is just the start; we need to think about how we are going to stay successful, and how we are going to avoid the six pitfalls that I have outlined. Do contact me to talk about this further.
The Mapping Motivation Series 