Bulldozer00's Blog

No one has ever failed to find the facts they are looking for. – Peter Drucker

Mr. Drucker may have gotten it wrong, at least in BD00’s case. It seems like the “facts” that I desperately need to continuously confirm my distorted world view come right up to me out of hiding and bite me in the bumpkiss. (If they don’t, I simply make some pseudo-facts up to feed the need).

Here’s one of the latest confirmations, and it’s in the form of another quote:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

Say what, you ask? That quote deftly closes this Forbes article written by “radical” Steve Denning: “Why Big Companies Die”.

Quoting Steve Jobs on where salesmen come into play, and adding his own two cents on where accountants come into play, “rad” Steve describes an oft repeated pattern of corpo demise:

“The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues. So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”” – Steve Jobs

“The activities of these people (the accountants) further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.” – Steve Denning

The dorky BD00 graph below attempts to map the above words onto an unscaled timeline.

Or, if you prefer, here’s an alternative view of this unconscious pattern of demise: