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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.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
Failure in PurposeThe Corporate Suicide Mission: The Emergence of Organizational Purpose
The Structure and Content of FailureThe Enemy Within: Organizational Members and Their Jobs
Dressed for Success, Qualified to Fail: Staffing the Organization
Failure in Methods and FunctionThe Psychopathology of Leadership
The Training and Evaluation of Incompetence
Failure as Its Own Reward
The Process of FailureTogether We Fall
Partners in Crime
The Company of Strangers: Organizational Communication and the Lack of It
The Outcome of FailureThe 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 FailureLearning from Failure: Saving Organizations from Themselves
The End of Organization as We Know It: Survival in the Postorganizational World
Epilogue
Appendices
Further Reading
Index
