I know why, it is because the worker bees are easy, they don’t complain. They accept their fate in many instances and take their one week for every year and go away silently. But Directors and Vice Presidents are different; these are smarter individuals many times with MBA’s from high powered schools. Even though we really don’t know what they do all day. Even though they don’t have any employees underneath them. We decide to stay top heavy, and continue to lose profitability because we do not tackle the hard issue of the company. Management and Executives!!!!!

Last time I checked, you need the worker bees to actually do the work.

Last time I checked, when a person is promoted to Director or Vice President the arrogance factor kicks in and they cannot do menial tasks any longer.

What happen to the days where a Director had 10 to 15 direct reports and roughly 100 to 200 indirect. Oh yeah, the span of control we had to decrease. Why because the people in Director or Vice President positions could not lead. Therefore we created new positions, and split departments up in order to make them more successful. Guess what looking at the state of most organizations, decreasing span of control did not work. So now, you have a lot of highly paid Directors and Vice Presidents who are dragging the organization down. So on the next round of layoffs, re-read the section on Inertia. Decide to be a Leopard rather than an Elephant. Because you know what eventually- happens to Elephants they go off and die!!!!!!!

There is an old wise tale about two hikers who are asleep in the woods and are awakened suddenly by a tiger around their tent. One of the hikers began to put his sneakers on and the other hikers ask "Why are you doing this?" The other hiker responds "To out run the tiger". The first hiker comes back with "You cannot out run a tiger". The other hiker replies "I don’t! I just need to outrun you".

The overall issue is that financial decline has become increasingly important. There is more and more evidence that traditional turnarounds efforts result in failure far more often than success (Altman, 1983; Nystrom & Starbuck, 1984; Pearce and Robbins, 1993). There is also increased evidence of that organization leaders undertake change and persist with failing courses of action. This is typically due by organization leaders’ unwillingness to admit to their chosen course of action is not working (Brockner, 1992).

The S-curve theory (Abernathy and Utterback 1978) has become a centerpiece in thinking on product development, as depicted above. It represents an inductively derived theory of the potential for product improvement cycles and their reinvention.