That’s a question many companies could ask themselve. In fact they didn’t lost their strategy but only half of it.

As I already said many companies and people tend to mistake means for goals. Said in practical terms that means that they consider many things, projects as final purpose althought the true objective is the impact of the project on the organization, to assess trainers instead of the training’s impact on people’s work, to gather ideas when the purpose is to launch new projets, and, as a conclusion, to consider that a company’s operation is the corporate goal.

We’ll try to focus on this late point. Each service becomes its own purpose, each person too. The underlying purpose of many intiatives is to justify and maintain what exist. This may seem logical but…

This is why people don’t have time to collaborate (because companies makes sure people are busy, so no time for any unplanned thing), that’s why the “that’s the way we’ve always done” theory often com to surface and  that’s why many projects are launched and successfully managed without bringing any kind of benefit.

Imagine a human organism, a child. Imagine its organism only works in order to satisfy its current needs. Not to prepare its growth, produce things that may be useless at this stage but key to reach the adult age. No muscles, no senses. One only concern : make the digestive machine run and get bigger. Imagine the result…scary, isn’t it. But that’s the way many companies operates : run and get bigger, even if it’s a threat to adapting to the future, to evolve.  Any likeness with what happened to the economic system is pure coincidence.

That reminds me of this excellent post from Michel Volle [fr] about enterprises, above all because he explains better than me what he calls “half-strategy”

Many companies don’t have a stragegy but halve-strategies. They want to “get biger to survive” but they stick on their traditional activities and refuse to diversify their offer. They want to “reduce costs” but neglect marketing. They want to stabilize their finance but renounce their R&D. Their directors neglect the corporate polyphony, the multitude of the logics it articulates and are all necessary, in they only pay attention to one melody.

By focusing on getting bigger, some may forget to grow. And when one gets bigger without growing, he becomes a vegetable.

It explains partly the gap between those who are successful in organizational tranformation and the others.