The exasperating thing about big companies in crisis is that they get there by doing the very things that once made them big. Roger Martin has been in the business of strategy consulting for 13 years and has only begun to appreciate how mechanically organizations resist new truths and how emotional this resistance can become. The experience of troubled companies is a syndrome with four stages. First the founders articulate their vision. Then the company develops steering mechanisms to operationalize the vision and guide the company through change. Unfortunately, these steering mechanisms tend to become rigid over time, with much stronger ties to the founding vision than to the changing economic environment. So in the third stage, feedback deteriorates. And the useful signals that do get through run into organizational defensive routines - the fourth stage - that prevent information from being put to proper use. The key to getting out of this syndrome - the key to achieving change-is to abandon blame and focus instead on what the company did right to get into the crisis it now faces. To answer that question, managers must examine the differences between the strategy the company espouses - the founder's vision, the steering mechanisms - and the strategy it enacts - the company's actual behavior with customers and competitors. The problem is not that one or the other of these two strategies is necessarily wrong, but that all too often they conflict. The author talks about this conflict in his own firm and in client companies and offers suggestions for its resolution by means of reverse engineering, data testing, strategic dialogue, scientific discipline, and the development of new measures of progress.
