Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

All those processes you put in place to make sure that "it doesn't happen again" - are destroying your organization's ability to innovate.

The most common reason once-great companies and projects go sideways is not technological or business disruption, it's that they eventually stop caring.

Certainly, we always need to search for new ideas and solutions — invention and discovery move humankind forward — but the biggest problems facing organizations today stem not from a dearth of new management ideas (we’re inundated with them), but primarily from a lack of understanding the basic fundamentals and, most problematic, a failure to consistently apply those fundamentals

Organization is the enemy of innovation.

If things aren't not failing you are not innovating enough.

I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, "I want to know where I'll die so I'll never go there." We want to see what has caused businesses to go bad. The biggest thing that kills them is complacency. ... The danger would always be that you rest on your laurels.

Poorly managed corporations, disorganized businesses, and badly led service agencies experience crisis daily and most will eventually fail. In contrast, the danger is to well organized, smooth running institutions that may not recognize a building crisis. Too often, sound organizations rely on their normal modus operandi to pull them through a crisis. It might. But at what cost? And what if it does not pull them through?

Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged. In large-scale strategy, when the enemy starts to collapse you must pursue him without letting the chance go. If you fail to take advantage of your enemies' collapse, they may recover.

Businesses that fail to change die, while their men move on. Militaries that fail to change move on, while their men die. {DCJ 16, July 2018}

The concept here is that a highly organized society can collapse through a population overload, even though the people themselves are not starving. It is the organization that ultimately becomes overloaded and collapses.

When companies fail, or fail to grow, it’s almost always because they don’t invest in the people, the systems, and the processes they need.