What are the signs of incipient failure or collapse?
Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward for a while, even if its leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow. Luck and chance play a role in many successful outcomes, and those who fail to acknowledge the role luck may have played in their success—and thereby overestimate their own merit and capabilities—have succumbed to hubris.
Might not be bad reading for the president.
Great catch Rand, posted to Newsvine. It is well worth reading.
Collins misses what to me is one of the prime causes of company failure, or perhaps he sees it as merely a symptom.
I refer to bureaucratization. When a company spends more of its resources, (human or financial) on administration than it does on whatever creates the wealth, then it is failing and failing fast.
Of course this applies to governments as well as companies, and governments routinely impose massive amounts of administration on companies, but it is a mistake for companies to blame government solely for the mess.
When your company has administrators administrating other administrators, then you have problems.
“Barbarians to Bureaucrats” by Lawrence Miller. How a company evolves, or doesn’t. Highly recommended as a warning sign resource.
What about NASA? Or military procurement?
The problem I have with the latest expose of waste in military hardware, you know, the $500 toilet seat and the $1000 hammer, is that it provokes a chorus of “there ought to be a law!” and procurement becomes even more defense and paperwork driven and mired.
The greater the fear of malfeasance or just plain human error or whatever, the more layers of checks upon checks upon checks, the more you have something like the Shuttle program which in the end still does not produce a particularly safe human-carrying spacecraft.