When a company begins to decline, owners and managers most often look outward. They blame the market, the competition, the government, customers, employees, and younger generations who, allegedly, no longer want to work.
They rarely look inward.
It is much easier to declare an external enemy than to admit that the greatest threat to the company may be sitting in its most important meeting. That the problem did not arise outside the system, but in the way the system is managed.
Perhaps employees haven’t lost their initiative; they’ve simply learned that it is punished. Perhaps they stay silent not because they have nothing to say, but because they’ve realized that in this company, the truth costs more than a mistake. Perhaps the competition didn’t destroy the business; it simply exploited the opening created by sluggishness, complacency, and years of poor decisions.
Perhaps even the best people didn’t leave for the money. Perhaps they simply no longer wished to bear the consequences of decisions they weren’t even allowed to question.
A company can begin to falter because of the conviction among those at the top that they are the last ones who should be held accountable. From that moment on, criticism becomes an attack, a warning is seen as insubordination, and every poor result is new proof that everyone has failed—except those in charge.
The hunt is no longer for the cause. It is for a sufficiently weak scapegoat.
The company’s most dangerous enemy, therefore, is often not the market, the competition, or the employees. It is the leadership that has enough power to create a problem, enough authority to prevent discussion of it, and enough people under them to always find someone to take the blame.
The market, the competition, and circumstances can seriously threaten a company.
But who dares to say that the problem lies in the way the company is run?
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