Based on data regarding corporate mortality, organizations are built to fail: a conclusion critical to managers, employees, stockholders, consultants, customers, vendors, competitors, and therefore all of us who transact with and depend on organizations. Yet, literature about organizational management tends to focus on education and inspiration, and to bristle with optimism about the potential success of applying its wares. Ignored, in virtually all of this literature is the reality that personnel may or may not be inherently self-interested, but certainly join business organizations in order to serve individual rather than organizational interests.

Individual self-interest is advanced through control of various processes in order to rationalize that self-interest as a productive, organizational purpose, which not simply suppresses opposition but also conceals or even demonizes that opposition. These processes include such familiar organizational functions as individual and organizational goal-setting, job and organizational design, leadership, hiring, performance appraisal, compensation, promotion, communication, corporate culture, and change.

At all levels, therefore, the organization's long-term interest is undermined by the goals of the very members of whom it is comprised-it is built to fail. And through control of its various internal processes and elimination of opposition, the organization pursues self-destructive goals without knowing it.

Zusammenfassung
This work explores how organizations are built to fail, arguing that personnel often serve individual rather than organizational interests; consequently the organization is likely inadvertently pursue self-destructive goals. The book also outlines possible solutions.

Inhalt

Preface Introduction Failure in Purpose The Corporate Suicide Mission: The Emergence of Organizational Purpose The Structure and Content of Failure The Enemy Within: Organizational Members and Their Jobs Dressed for Success, Qualified to Fail: Staffing the Organization Failure in Methods and Function The Psychopathology of Leadership The Training and Evaluation of Incompetence Failure as Its Own Reward The Process of Failure Together We Fall Partners in Crime The Company of Strangers: Organizational Communication and the Lack of It The Outcome of Failure The Smoking Gun: Life Inside the Monopoly The Ritual of Change The Blind Leading the Blind: Learning How to Fail The Agony of Defeat: The Hidden Costs of Organizational Failure Beyond Failure Learning from Failure: Saving Organizations from Themselves The End of Organization as We Know It: Survival in the Postorganizational World Epilogue Appendices Further Reading Index