4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company or start-up

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company
or start-up

90% of start ups fail and 80% of product launches are not successful, and in this article you will know exactly how to join this number and fail your own start up as well.

In his book why do good companies go bad , Donald N Sull was able to determine what he called a dysfunctional mechanism or what we can call dynamic of failure.

The first approach to failure is strategic approach:

As human being we tend to have mental short cuts or cognitive schema in which we use to classify and categorize the world around us and business owners,

leaders and startup managers are no different than the rest of human beings, the way a start up or a business view the market and their own company is through mental schemes which are called strategic approach.

one of perfect examples to showcase such a concept is Firestone

“After seven decades of uninterrupted growth, Firestone reigned supreme in the U.S. tire industry in the 1970s.Then Michelin introduced the safer and more economical radial tire.

Firestone competed with Michelin head-to-head in Europe, but was blind to the threat to its core U.S. market, and so continued to produce conventional tires only. Firestone lost significant market share and was acquired a decade later.”

This is not just an example of business strategies this is an example of human thought as well, this methodology represents the fixed mind set process which deceives the human mind through ego-centrism that there is only one strategic approach to solve every problem and it’s  the only survival approach.

The second tip of startup destruction is the process:

At this stage you need to stick to the idea of transforming the process into rigid routines machine like and highly optimized a good example of this is McDonald’s.

“McDonald’s built its success on standardized processes, all dictated by headquarters. By rigidly following these procedures into the 1990s, McDonald’s lost market share to Burger King and Taco Bell, who were much quicker to meet customers’ changing desires for healthier foods.”

People in general are afraid of change let that be a change of situations, people, thought, change of hearts and for sure very afraid of change of process. Because when we as human know the sequence of things or the norm of specific process this gives us the illusion of control.

The fear of change is adaptive cognitive mechanism in itself; the fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Since times immemorial, man has liked routine. Our internal predispositions (heredity and genetics) teach us to resist change mainly to ‘always feel in control’. 

That’s one of the reasons people and businesses tend to stick to a specific process.

The main obvious downside to that these days is that we are living in a very dynamic environment and our ecology changes almost in a daily basis some of these changes are revolutionary to us as individuals and to our businesses.

I am almost certain that some of VHS, CD player store had a perfect process in terms of cleanness of the stores , customer care maybe loyalty programs yet this is all what it was. Just another process.

The third tip for the ultimate destruction is values:

I think this is self explanatory really how many times had dogmas or rigid beliefs destroyed companies, start-ups, life’s or a perfectly good cards game?

Bureaucracy  is a perfectly good example of a very important set of beliefs and values. The main idea is documentation of important events and rules that can regulate the work place to reach optimum efficiency,
yet what bureaucracy  has become is more of paper worship and it became a tool of destruction more than a tool to regulate and monitor.

By definition values are “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

So the values o a company or an organization is regarded as useful when that specific institution has started after all they were put in place for a reason and these values contributed to the institution process of the institution,

however values can be solid and rigid as much as you can yet the trends , the tools or the whole ecology of an industry or a business changes in a consistent basis.

Companies that stick to rigid values are sticking to destructive code.

The fourth tip for you companies doom is relationships:

Now in general relationships can form some kind of shackles that will tie you in and hold growth. This could be relationships with constituencies—customers, suppliers, employees. When conditions change, however, these relationships can restrict flexibility.

The Example that was given in the book I am referring to here was apple

“Apple’s vision of technically elegant computers and its freewheeling culture attracted the world’s most creative engineers. Once computers became commodities, however, the company’s health depended on cutting costs and speeding up production time.

But Apple’s engineers refused to change, and the company’s relationship with its “star” employees damaged its ability to respond to market changes.”

This is not the only case or the only form of shackling in terms of relationships for example it might make sense now if you’re a marketing or digital agency to partner with an offline events company, they make the events and you make the online marketing buzz.

However on the long run when you have different demands from different clients alignment between let’s say telecom corporate (your clients) and wedding planners (their clients) might lead to an un healthy relation.

And there you have it these are the 4 amazingly granted tips or your own start up destruction

1-      Turn your strategic approach to a solid frames of thinking

2-      Turn process into rigid routines

3-      Turn your values into dogmas

4-      Turn relationships into shackles

Can you add more points to the list ?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment and we can always talk more on

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