Bulldozer00's Blog

Assume that your company is cruising along and creating high quality products, happy customers, and making money. The drawing below shows this situational bliss – a well oiled machine.

Now assume that something in your previously flawless system has gone bad. Your product quality has tanked, your customers are angry, and your profitability has shrunk. The lightning bolts in the figure below show places of potential dysfunction that are causing and contributing to the mess.

So, how do you figure out what’s gone wrong so that you can fix the stank? Of course, if you’re in the management group, you’ll automatically discard yourself and your brethren as a source of the problem(s). Since you have an agenda to look good and an unshakable self-image of infallibility, you’ll go poking around in all areas and cross-group interfaces except your own.

Since almost all corpo performance problems are the result of bozo management actions and a lack of leadership, one effective way of diagnosing and fixing what ails you is to bring in an objective outside troubleshooter who will tell you the unabashed truth. Alas, since you’ll be sourcing the income for any outside troubleshooter, he/she will most likely milk the job and tell you what you want to hear: you’re not the problem.