mikedewitt.net

Every year bold initiatives in organizations large and small fail miserably for a handful of predictable reasons. This series examines a few of them in an irreverent manner. Excerpt:

How can such bad things happen to good concepts?

Simple. The executive who read about the new concept in Harvard Business Review doesn’t really want to apply the concept. No, he wants an instant application that gives him the same results as the HBR case study! And he wants it in time to effect this year’s earnings!! There’s no time for a complete definition of context, and besides, we’re mostly similar to those other companies anyway, so let’s bring in a complete application, tweak it for the most important unique characteristics of our company, and get a quick win!

But since we don’t know anything about the new concept - and because we’re in a hurry - we don’t realize that the color of the boot was only relevant because the last application the consultant built was at a bullfighting establishment in Matamoros. Dios Mio!

Read the whole thing here!

Here’s part two and part three - attack of the consensus blob.