What Are You Doing Wrong In Business?
The Smart Manager|March-April 2016

The havoc incompetent managers can wreak is immeasurable. And incompetence and failure have costs: financial, organizational, and human. When a business fails, or when it suffers a serious setback, its entire mission is compromised. It can no longer serve its customers; it can no longer perform the social function for which it was created. In an interview with The Smart Manager, Morgen Witzel offers a peep into the seven sins of management detailed in his latest book Managing for Success, and tells us how managers can shape cultures that minimize failure.

Anitha Moosath
What Are You Doing Wrong In Business?

The root causes of failure are often buried deep within an organization. How does a culture of incompetence come into being?

The usual cause is a combination of inattention on the part of leadership, and the wrong people in the wrong places within the organization. One of the tasks of the leader is to ensure that the organization has a strong culture that enables it to meet its goals. Leaders therefore have to spend a lot of their time monitoring the culture of the organization and influencing it, usually by example. They set the moral tone for the organization, which the rest then follow. But if leaders take their hand off the tiller, the culture will start to drift. Without examples to follow, people care less about the work they do, or their colleagues, and start to think more about themselves.

And when that happens, the door is open for other figures of influence to emerge. People with their own agenda–be it corruption or greed, or just plain laziness and inattention–start to become the dominant influencers, and the rest of the organization takes its cue from them. It is shocking how easy it is for a culture to slide from being progressive and innovative into inertia–this is the way we do things, we are not going to change. And once this happens, it is really hard to turn things around.

How would you explain your concept of ‘wasted opportunity cost’?

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March-April 2016-Ausgabe von The Smart Manager.

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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March-April 2016-Ausgabe von The Smart Manager.

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