Corporate Failure by Design

Based on data regarding corporate mortality organizations are built to fail: a conclusion critical to managers employees stockholders consultants customers vendors competitors and therefore all of us who transact with and depend on organizations. Yet literature about organizational management tends to focus on education and inspiration and to bristle with optimism about the potential success of applying its wares. Ignored in virtually all of this literature is the reality that personnel may or may not be inherently self-interested but certainly join business organizations in order to serve individual rather than organizational interestsdividual self-interest is advanced through control of various processes in order to rationalize that self-interest as a productive organizational purpose which not simply suppresses opposition but also conceals or even demonizes that opposition. These processes include such familiar organizational functions as individual and organizational goal-setting job and organizational design leadership hiring performance appraisal compensation promotion communication corporate culture and change.At all levels therefore the organization''s long-term interest is undermined by the goals of the very members of whom it is comprisedit is built to fail. And through control of its various internal processes and elimination of opposition the organization pursues self-destructive goals without knowing it.