How the Mighty Fall

I just finish reading a book, the latest title from Jim Collins “How the Mighty Fall and why some companies never give in” and thought that it would good to share some of the findings in this book. From the author of “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”, this book offers a fresh perspective of why some seemingly great companies fall and even slip to oblivion. His research indicated that organizational decline is largely self-inflicted and recovery largely within their own control.

There are five step-wise stages of decline:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Success is viewed as “deserved”, rather than hard earned and people believe that success will continue almost no matter what the organization decides to do, or not to do. Leaders lose the inquisitiveness and learning orientation and people presume that success is due entirely to the superior qualities of the enterprise and its leadership.

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Companies have this unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great. There is an erosion in cost discipline and declining proportion of right people in key seats. People increasingly think in terms of “jobs” rather than responsibilities. People seek to capitalize for the short term, rather than investing primarily in building for greatness decades into the future.

Stage 3:Denial of risk and Peril
There is a tendency to discount or explain away negative data rather than presume something is wrong with the company. Rather than confront brutal realities, the enterprise chronically reorganizes and people are increasingly preoccupies with internal politics rather than external conditions. Leaders set audacious goals and/or make big bets and shift towards either consensus or dictatorial management rather than a process of argument and disagreement followed by unified commitment to execute decisions.

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
There is a tendency to make dramatic, big moves or to find the silver bullets. Leaders “sell the future” to compensate for the lack of current results, initiating a pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. People cannot easily articulate what the organization stands for; core values have eroded to the point of irrelevance, the company has become “just another place to work”, a place to get paycheck and people lose faith in their ability to triumph and prevail. People become distrustful, regarding visions and values as little more than PR and rhetoric.

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death.

Although the book content is primarily in the context of an organization, I feel that there are some lessons that we can apply or learned in our daily activities and also department.

1) Get the right people for the right job
From the book, it states that any exceptional enterprise depends first and foremost upon having self managed and self motivated people. If you have the right people, you don’t need to have a lot of senseless rules and mindless bureaucracy in the first place! This can be manifested in what as known as Packard’s Law which was named after David Packard, cofounder of HP. The Law states that no company can consistently grow revenues faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.

2) Distinction between wrong people and right people
Wrong people see themselves as having “jobs”. Right people see themselves as having responsibilities.

3) How to react to panic and desperation
When we find ourselves in trouble, our survival instinct and our fear can evoke behavior contrary to survival. This is the very moment when we need to take calm, deliberate action. Breathe, Calm yourself. Think. Focus. Aim. Take one shot at a time.

4) Failure vs success
We would all fall as we go through life. It is one thing to fall, but another thing to give up. Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind. Success is falling down, and getting up one more time, without end.

5) Good vs bad innovation
Innovation does not mean that a company would not fall from greatness. In his study, even when the company increased the number of innovations or activities, it still goes on to the path of decline. The examples he quoted are Motorola and HP. Innovation can fuel growth, but frantic innovation – growth that erodes consistent tactical excellence – can easily send a company cascading through the stages of decline.

====================================================================

This has nothing to do with the book, but thought of sharing some thoughts and experience after I left the team. After I join product, a few people ask me why I want to join product since I am doing “so well” and “so comfortable” in marketing. Was I “tricked” into joining product or “asked” to join product? Is marketing becoming very “siong” or is it because of the boss?

To put things into perspective, I joined product of my own accord. I have been in SingTel long enough to also know that product management is not a bed of roses. (question you might want to ask is why do I want to change, am I not happy in marketing ?)

Actually it is for my own career development that I wanted to change to a different function. It allows me to gain a different perspective of how the company operates from a different function. I gained that when I moved from bid to marketing, and moving to product just seems a natural progression (since I don’t think I am a sales person). Of course, it is tougher for me now that I am in a position that I have no experience in and new things need to be learnt and new relationships need to be built. In a way, product management might even be “tougher” than marketing since product people deals with more internal stakeholders than external people. Not even BG people but singtel people outside of BG. It helps that I am not “new new”, in the sense that I did not join from outside, but that also had its own set of “problems” in the sense that people have a certain expectation or perception of me since I am not that “new”.

I think we all agreed that we are not that “well paid” in SingTel, no matter what HR said or how much “Brain washing” or “propaganda” that we get from management. But there is one advantage that SingTel has over a lot of other companies, is that SingTel is a large organization with many diverse functions and responsibilities. Make use of the opportunity if you have to experience the many different job scopes that come with working in SingTel. That is not to say that you must change department or job scope, but does give you an option to continually learn, meet new people, upgrade yourself and experience new challenges. I would never have imagined that I would become a marketing manager when I was studying in university, doing events and generating leads for sales. But I did.

Yes, I am still “struggling” and learning the ropes and there would be instances when I would hit the wall, but tough times would not last forever and I am sure there would come a time when I am as “comfortable” in product as I was once in marketing.

weeyong