Why Great organisations die?!
By: Femi Aboluwarin
Tags: Self Help, Entrepreneurship, Business Development, Workplace, Management And Leadership

I do not claim to have worked in lots of great organisations nor have I sat with teams across many great organisations to study in detail what makes them great. I haven’t understudied extensively great organisations that faltered and eventually missed their way either.

However after being self employed for a little over a decade & returning to paid employment in a handful of ‘great’ technology organisations, I want to believe I have some insight into why great organisations die. Mind you, I didn’t say thrive and hopefully, you will get to understand my morbid point of view shortly.

But first, two stories.

Story 1

The second company I worked for during my return to work was one whose reputation preceded it. For about a decade, I had heard lots of great things about the company in the tech media space as well as from a friend that worked there.

You couldn’t help but be jealous to hear about the fun holidays,the cool gizmos and much more that my friend talked about. I never imagined I’d work there someday but, I did end up there. By the time I got in, the golden era was well over and done with. It didn’t take a seer or a rocket scientist to figure this out.

Surely, there were still great things to be said about the company. I had a spring in my step going to work daily and felt great to be part of a great organisation. That was short lived however, given all the things I had observed, which leads me to the meat and bone of story one.

My team was made up of young-lings — folks barely old enough to grow a beard or laden with responsibilities such as mine — a man in his mid thirties starting over in the world of tech. The sloppiness in the team was just mind boggling.

If someone arrived late to work, there were no penalties save some odd stares here and there. Worst still was the quality of excuses thrown around. Someone arrived at work at 10:30 am once for a job start of 08:30 am and his excuse was not hearing his alarm. The manager chuckled and that was it.

There were many times customer tickets would come in and folks would ignore it for upwards of 10 mins hoping the next person will pick it. The balance of play and work was awfully skewed. Many of the so called team players in the team were actually doing what they say they did best — PLAY THE TEAM. They got ahead and got by doing not so much.

There were a lot of incentives with metrics, and as such, many had learned quickly to game/play the system. There were the odd pack like me, and a few other chaps who had a different attitude to work; but had been told many times to tone down our throughput as it made others ‘look bad’.

I could cite scenario after scenario but that would be draining. What was even far more draining was customer feedback. There was occasionally a bad NPS score (NPS was the metrics to measure customer satisfaction) or the irate customer on the phone shelling out expletives I cannot even mention here to express their utter dissatisfaction.

Sadly, this company started off on the same footing and about the same time as the likes of Google and Amazon but dropped off the radar when they stopped innovating and focused on client services. However, their reputation was still intact causing newer victims to fall prey to the poor quality of deliverables.

What takes the cherry for me was engaging in a conversation about a problematic customer. I infamously quipped that I wouldn’t hire the same company I worked for if I owned a business requiring business support. Everyone was shocked. I wasn’t!

I explained and asked everyone to look at the mirror. Were we really performing at our optimal best, were we giving customers what was promised bla bla bla. Some wise ass tried to explain to me that the devil I knew was better than the one I didn’t.

Point lost in translation but as time went on, and before I left, I saw the rapid decline in the company.

Story 2

Back to the same company, there were different kinds of managers. Like politicians, there were those who made a career of managering but not managing anything let alone work.

There were those who were awful at their roles but managed to play their cards right into management, eventually into senior management and then into key decision making roles.

I guess the prestige and the wealth associated with such vantage positions must surely be intoxicatingly attractive but, I wonder if the responsibility to deliver is equally intoxicating: it shows.

At the lower leagues, I had managers (at least two) who were weird and different. Different isn’t always a good thing and so is the case with these two.

The first, let’s call him Luke, was not bothered about anything that mattered to the folks he managed. His bark was not only worse than his bite — he couldn’t even bark. I once complained that there were team mates who spent way too much time playing (going upstairs to play table tennis or downstairs to play video games in the games room or watching tutorial videos for a certification on work time more so when work gave us four hours every week for personal development).

My proposition to him was to divide our 8 hour shift to 4 hours of intense undivided attention to work and the next 4 to a mix of work and play. That way, if you’ve given your ultimate best for 4 hours, none would fault you for sauntering around the streets of work later on. I suggested we could even rota this and stagger across the team.

Dude looked at me with the lovingness of a mother hen and encouraged me to try to call them out instead when I saw them faffing about. Hey? Am I the manager? no! That’s your job! Let’s just say nothing changed till I left the team thanks to promotion. It was a most inefficient team with only a small fraction of the team carrying on the team torch. This manager blocked so many things for so many people just because he could.. I guess!

Safe to say, as soon as I got promoted, I heard he moved to a new team that paid more money, not as a manager but now as a tech. Odd much!

And that brought me to my next blessing. My next manager was different and initially, he was a breath of fresh air. He wanted to be your friend, to know what was going on in your life and importantly, talked a lot.

Let me save you most of the details, the peculiar one was his notebook at one-to-one sessions. He was always writing down something when we discussed. I was impressed at first because the former manager never did and I spent more hours reminding him of what he had forgotten to do or giving him recaps of what we discussed.

However, new dude had a habit of asking me stupid questions — stupid because we had spoken about that a few months before. Whatever you wrote down, didn’t you read or revisit it? Apparently not as I figured eventually.

I had a tough time with him complaining about my closure rates being low. It didn’t make sense to either of us given that, at the time, I was one of the few people working on the most tickets or issues. It was puzzling also because as much as I was closing work and finishing things, it wasn’t reflected in my metrics. I eventually figured it out. There was someone else in the team who was a high flyer with closures but given that I knew him (he sat not too far from my desk), he wasn’t the hardest worker.

I discovered he was poaching closed tickets. The way the ticketing system worked was that you finished a job assigned to you, complete it and it sends a confirmation to the customer to agree it’s finished (even when we’ve already established). When the customer confirms, it sends another notification back to close it. Faux dude was busy scouring the ticket lists for tickets in pending closure and closing them.

My question to manager dude was ‘who gets the closure code? The person who spent days working on the issue and closing it or the person who confirms closure’

When dude realised how political and cornering my question was, as it would expose quarks in his team, he fluffed his way through the conversation and didn’t give me an answer for weeks. Trust me, I pressed hard for the answer which I never got.

I had to become smarter sending notifications to my personal phone so as to monitor closure notifications and that was the only way I got out of this constantly fortnightly complaint.

There were other senior managers who were so egoistical and made everything about themselves. There were mentors who didn’t do any work of mentoring but just lounged and bounced around work daily pretending to busy.

All in all, with many take overs and company buy outs, the demands of new owners were met with yes middle managers who had no regard for the foot soldiers below their station. There were always all these demands that trickled down to our managers and eventually to us much to a lot of disgust and complaints.

There were also managers who blocked pay rises or capped your earnings when you were promoted in team. The company didn’t ask them to do this but I guess they were trying to impress senior management on cost savings. The domino effect remained that great talents always flocked out in droves. Newer ones came in and sooner than later, would realise it was only a reputation we had and nothing more and would leave after a few month much to the waste of time and investment in that new hire.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — —— — — —

I could tell you many more stories but after all these experiences, I’ve observed why many great organisations die.

Let’s get into it.

1. Great organisations are made of people and systems.

Without placing value in people, without investing in great systems, the work culture will eventually suffer.

People are also weird so just valuing them is insufficient. You have to also demand excellent from them and put systems into place to ensure that these demands are reasonably and realistically met.

The moment organisations begin to think no one is indispensable (which may be true), the moment they forget the value of their investment.

You don’t invest in shares for 4 years and when the company is beginning to mature and turn a huge profit and in turn dividend, decide to sell all your shares and start over. However, companies do this a lot.

2. If you value excellence, then create a culture of excellence.

So many companies crave all the trappings of success and excellence but only a few organisations are committed to an on-going drive to push the culture of excellence.

It’s easy to quickly equate sales figures, industry reputation and rapid growth to success but at the end of the day, it’s consistent innovation, and at the heart of it — excellence, that drives companies to greater heights.

Way too many company chase the golden goose of money, neglect the players/teams in the company that indirectly do not bring in the fat cows but provided the infrastructure upon which the fat cows graze. Eventually, the battered grass becomes disgruntled and there will be nowhere for the fattened cows to graze and it falls down. If you must celebrate people or teams or divisions, celebrate them first for the excellent things they do in the company before the profit they make the company. Similarly, don’t penalise teams for not making you money. Are they innovative? are they doing things well? they may eventually strike gold someday in the future — who knows?

And it goes to say that without vision, excellence will be ever fleeting.

If you’ve not defined an excellent vision to complement your business plan; a vision that is well communicated and documented to your workforce, it will be hard to drive them towards excellence in all they do.

Sell them the vision! Let them chew on it! They will reproduce that vision, run with it and in no time, the culture of excellence, consistently produced as a result of this, will get your organisation flying.

3. Feedback is at the very best, the soul of healthy growth.

Feedback is healthy but in a culture where everyone makes everything personal, where everyone hates to be shown how rubbish they are, where everyone wants to be adored, feedback becomes a tricky beast to handle.

First of all, we need to establish that feedback is and should never be personal. Whatever was said back to people should have nothing to do with their appearance, race, faith, pedigree or anything else but WHAT THEY DO and HOW THEY DO IT. It’s easy to want to sugarcoat negatives and downplay positives because we move our gaze from the what and how to the who. All feedback, be it negative or positive, should lead and lend itself to growth — growth that comes from changes made in increments or in huge leaps as a result of said feedback. If it doesn’t grow the organisation then it’s negative feedback.

Every great organisation should create a culture where the least employee on the cadre of relevance should be able to give feedback to the most relevant employee without repercussions or payback.

All great leaders should be able to separate their egos from what they deliver, filter out yes people or boot-lickers and focus on the object that lies in the heart of all feedback.

Importantly, customer and industry feedback is also good. If they are complaining about something, don’t go defensive neither should you batter yourself into agreeing submissively. Evaluate what has been said logically. Document the feedback that will be helpful and make changes.

No one likes empty promises and no amount of meetings held can change a negative reputation. If your staff, customers or peers know that your organisation will not take feedback nor will they act on promises made as a result of the feedback, they will disengage and you will miss opportunities in grow!

Always keep your eye on the goal! Don’t get buried in the emotions of feedback. Growth is the end goal!

4. Culture is overrated — Don’t forget to do the work just because of culture

One of the perks of working in most start-ups or technology firms is the quirky culture. I’ve also worked in another tech company that was extremely bureaucratic and very ‘grown-up’. There are benefits to all sides but the important buzz word that gets thrown around a lot is ‘culture’.

As I can’t define work culture for all organisations, it’s easier to say this. Your organisation’s culture should be shaped by your organisations core values. If you’ve not defined this yet, your culture will be like eating an English Curry with Sushi dumped into it and spaghetti for dessert dipped in a lot of Habanero Halloumi toppings. That is totally confusing and this is what you will get.

Just because Goggle has slides in their HQ, you don’t need to have that too. Do you need to get your staff a competitive pension, health insurance, gym subscriptions, free lunches or beers after work and so on and so forth? Yes! maybe but do it because of the value you place on people not because that is what your competitors are doing. If you don’t understand your own culture, in the days when business remains static or faltering, it will always be the perks of your culture that will suffer first.

Next, all cultures can easily become toxic. Don’t over-promise customers just because your team can deliver. Their ability to deliver does not mean the culture remains beneficial to their health, their sanity, their happiness or their family life. Far too many companies have created a work culture that leaves staff a shadow of the person they were when they started.

Do not also confuse competitiveness for devilish ambition. Rewards are great but if people must trample over others to get ahead, then it would drain great talent from among you eventually with the not so great ones (who sadly are usually the most devilish in ambition) remaining to clone more of themselves and increase the temperature of toxicity.

Finally, don’t forget to do the work in the name of creating a fun environment. No one wakes,bathes and get into public transport to go and have fun at work. Well, okay! I may be wrong because some people are wired that way. While it may great to have fun moments at work, our first reason for being there is to work. Let the times of fun and play be definitive and clear. Play hard in those moments! When it is time to work, work hard also.

Culture is great but culture shouldn’t be everything you are about!

5. Innovation is great but being adaptable is far better.

Great innovators always come out on top. This is not disputable historically but what becomes easily disputable is how long innovators have a monopoly over the first lane. Yes, we may all reference your innovation as the yardstick for others there after (e.g. Skype me! Please subscribe! push the start button! I love your iPod! let’s Netflix and chill).

You will probably recognise the technologies I have referenced but sadly, many other clones have come after them and while sometimes, they might even be better, we still reference the first mentions.

As comforting as that is, most great innovations have also died and have been long forgotten. Let’s not forget the likes of Blackberry, Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia and many more.

Whilst they were all monstrously huge organisations known for their innovation, they weren’t nimble on their feet to changing trends around the world at large (and not just in their industry).

Without adaptability, your innovation will soon become long forgotten. To quote Steve Jobs loosely, “Most people don’t know what they need or want until they see it”. This is the reason why you have to be adaptable to the changing needs of consumers, customers or clients. Sometimes, they may not even know they need features such Boomerang,disappearing stories, voice notes in messaging apps or video calls but when things change around the world we exist in, we have to adapt quickly.

Failing to move quickly enough or otherwise can be all it takes to lose or gain market share.

6. No matter how annoying they are, the customers actually pay our salaries.

The customer is king! Period! However, we can become conceited and wise enough in our own eyes to think we are sole reason our success is unprecedented.

I will not belabour your blindside nor indifferent confidence in your achievements so far but the moment we start treating customers/consumers badly, the moment we start delivering sub par services or products, the moment we start to slip nor take their concerns into consideration is the moment we start to slide off the leader-board.

Customers are like children. Their allegiance most times is to who is most beneficial to them. Some are loyal but loyalty is much like the British weather. You just don’t know what you will get sometimes.

Whatever you do, don’t forget they shape your financials and with every milestone, we need a sense of humility in approaching all customers new and old alike.

Let your long term customers also feel valued. There’s nothing as annoying as neglecting their needs in favour of the new player or kiddo on the block with shiner things to offer you.

“A good name is worth more riches” — you probably also know how much damage a bad reputation can do also. If you don’t, just check how hard companies work to answer a terrible review online.

Keep the customer happy as far as you can healthily to your organisation and you will get a lot of great years of support from them.

Finally, build a great product, deliver a great service, meet a pressing need well and do what you promise to deliver at the best quality you can if you claim to be a great organisation. This is all the customer wants! This is what keeps the customer paying and coming back.

7. The greatest handicap of great organisations is the last achievement they’ve realised.

The enemy of the good is always your last good.

I congratulate you on that. Soak it all in for a week or two and totally forget about it. It’s easy to build monuments around the last major achievement you’d worked hard towards. We wear it like a badge, we share it everywhere, we add it to print publications, we make a big ceremony of it and it’s all great.

However, the drive to be inventive can easily be lost when comfort sets in. Many a great invention or innovation was birthed from a need to solve problems. When we stop being hungry to solve problems around us, we can easily set ourselves up the slippery slope to decline.

Everyone likes a gold medal winner but unless you keep winning new gold medals, as soon as the new person that has won a gold medal shows up, you will not be treated with the utmost honour reserved for winners in the moment.

Strive to a great organisation but also strive to not let your success get into your corporate head space by making formulas out of your successes. You are dealing with people and working with real money not monopoly notes. Gambling on your future off the back of your past laurels might bite your fingers real hard. If you didn’t gamble in the past, then approach the future with the same degree of with due diligence not on the fluffy feelings of your success today!

8. Think long term when building today.

Many great organisations also die because they don’t think long term. Their planning doesn’t take into account quarters, annuals and cycles that shape or change our world.

So, the economy crashes? yes! but will it pick up again? surely! When? maybe in the next 5 to 10 years. So plan for it!

So, the economy has been booming for a long time? will it be wise to start taking loans just because everyone is spending? maybe yes, maybe no? historically, economies that go up may soon come back down.

Whatever great organisations do, their capacity planning, feasible studies, market research and financial forecasting takes into account historical trends as well as future predictions as to where the market may shift or were consumer needs may go.

Fashion brands for example plan fashions seasons up to three years in advance. What you wore 3 years ago was decided for you 6 years ago and this is because they need to get suppliers getting to work on it without disappointment or delay.

Great organisations have to stop thinking short term nor should they respond to every change or trend in the markets or industry they are in without being well researched and informed. If you must makes changes, please do but with the long term goal in view.

9. Relationships matter! Foster an environment that encourages healthy working relationships.

Everything rests with leadership and all great leaders should learn to foster organisations that builds great working relationships.

Most people spend an inordinate amount of time at work and sadly, if you don’t like the people you work with, eventually, you will find your way out of the door.

I know companies who pride themselves as family friendly or family organisations. I know organisations that try to buddy you up and connect you with people with similar traits or habits or interests as yours. All these things builds a faux friendship within work circles that becomes a marketing engine to lure other great talent in.

The worst thing you want is for great talent to be sucked out because someone they bonded with somewhere else has managed to convince them to come work where they now work. The same way that is possible is the same way great minds can be lured in when people find work a space and great space to work in.

The moment you start treating people like crap from top down, the moment you start creating an environment where great relationships become hard to mould and shape.

I may not be your friend but I should not hate to see your face in every meeting we attend together. The energy spent in trying to block you from my peripheral vision could have been invested in contributing something useful to the meeting.

Great managers should be able to hire great team fits and in the case where this isn’t possible, be the buffer to ensure that ‘odd ball’ in the team is accepted somehow or allowed to be without making the others uncomfortable.

Looking outwards, working relationships with suppliers, contract staff, other organisations, unions, the press etc also matters. No one company exist in isolation. You may not like the new guy at that organisation but you always need to remember your history with them, their value to you now and in the future and you must find a way to just relate with the new guy in charge without getting too personal.

Also, if you help them undercut someone else just because you will benefit from their scheme, be rest assured that they can do the same to you anytime soon. Be an organisation with trading integrity and moral lines you will not cross. Eventually, everyone you relate with should be able to know where you stand and how far you will go or not go!

10. In a world where everyone is a Princess, be Batman!

Finally, the world is full of boring unimaginative clones. It’s totally easy to find something that works and just reproduce or clone it.

However, to actually stand out and to continue to stand out for great products or services is another ball game entirely. We all love innovative companies like Apple but if Steve Jobs was obsessed with being liked by other industry players or fitting in, we probably wouldn’t celebrate Apple the way we do now. (While I don’t approve of all his methods, his drive and tenacity for creating the world he wanted to see is admirable).

All the companies that standout and are celebrated dared to find a problem, solve it and improved on newer solutions to the same age long problems. The Tesla brand didn’t solve a new problem. They have just found a way to continue to improve on what they set out to do.

The likes of Uber don’t even own one taxi nor do AirBnb own any properties but rather than be a cab service or hotel, they chose to be Batman — disruptive and different in many ways.

You don’t always need to do a lot also to be Batman. Sometimes, it’s just doing the simplest of things. Cook chicken and do it well — Hello KFC! But something sweet in a bottle and do it well — Hello Coca Cola! I could write a list of companies that make bag peanuts or those that make colouring pencils but you will always find that there will be brands that stand out and customers will remain loyal to them year in year out.

Someone once said also that they had never seen ads for Chinese takeaways and that stayed with me. They weren’t even trying to be Batman! They emigrated from their countries to the West and created Gotham. They created a version of food from their homeland and called it ‘Chinese food’ and now everyone wants a piece of it without even advertising it or raving about it.

If you can be Batman, be Batman! Better still, create Gotham! Create an entire ecosystem to support your dreams as an organisation.

Jeff Bezos is a great example of someone who decided to be Batman.(and yes, he was way too ruthless in playing his part as Batman but don’t forget Amazon lost money for a long time before it started flying).

Jeff went on ahead to create not only a digital bookshop, the world’s biggest online store and much more, he also created the technological infrastructure (AWS) for it to run out. Better still, he outsourced that infrastructure out to others who built great companies on top of it. Better still (and maybe worse depending on how you’re viewing it), he started companies they were competitors to customers on his technological platform .e.g. Netflix vs Amazon Prime. He hasn’t rested on all this good. He’s bought media house, food malls and much more.

The point is if you can be Batman, be Batman in a world full of Princesses. Better still, if the sky is indeed your starting point, be visionary enough to build your own Gotham and create the world you want to be in as an organisation in the future!