Managing Corporate Lifecycles Quotes

“The most obvious examples of pathological problems are: uncontrollable negative cash flow, continuous emigration of key human resources away from the organization, unresolved quality problems, rapidly declining market share, and tremendous drops in the company’s capacity to raise financial resources. Organizations with those problems can’t afford therapy because therapy takes time, and time is a resource those organizations do not have. Instead of an organizational therapist, the board should hire an organizational turnaround specialist who can temporarily take on the chief executive officer’s role, and perform whatever “surgery” is necessary.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, Managing Corporate Lifecycles - Volume 1: How Organizations Grow, Age & Die

“Whenever an organization makes the transition from one lifecycle stage to the next, difficulties arise. In order to learn new patterns of behavior, organizations must abandon their old patterns. When an organization expends energy to make effective transitions from old to new patterns of behavior, I consider its problems normal. If, however, an organization expends energy inward in futile attempts to remove blockages to change, it is experiencing abnormal problems which usually require external therapeutic intervention. If the abnormality is prolonged and threatens the organization’s existence, its problems are pathological, requiring a different intervention—surgical, not therapeutic, in nature.”
― Ichak Kalderon Adizes, Managing Corporate Lifecycles - Volume 1: How Organizations Grow, Age & Die