Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns!

At any one time within an organisation there are a large number of things to fix or improve. When things are going well it is difficult to justify significant change in case the successes are diminished. Conversely, when things are going badly, or the business is under pressure due to economic conditions, change is the word on everyone’s lips. 

Addressing the fundamentals of the business, whether this be product quality, service levels, pricing or marketing should be at the forefront of decision makers minds. Why should it be the case then that shallow, ill-conceived re-organisations are so popular when more important issues need to be dealt with.

I think the answer is that humans are not logical creatures and often have trouble facing up to difficult challenges when there are easier but less important problems to solve.

Why look hard at the viability of your oldest product or service? Why question the new market sector initiative that you took last year? Why make difficult long term decisions on pricing? Why do any of these things when an easy option is to move some people around, rename departments and re-write job profiles. 

Re-organisations create a lot of noise, make people believe that their managers are taking strong decisions and distract people from the more significant impact of falling sales. It is a tried and tested method of pepping up a business but I think that they lack genuine dynamism.

The new saying might read that you don’t get fired for ordering re-organisations but these days maybe someone should.