Lies
““When a company starts to lose its major battles, truth is usually the first casualty”.”
I like this one,
In his seminal book about the tough and often unnatural act of running a company Ben talks about the “the lies people tell themselves”. Or more to my view, the lies we are often suddenly willing to believe when things stop working. I have seen it happen at all levels of an organization.
When companies start to lose big battles, everyone wants a story. Everyone wants a simple explanation to seduce us into believing the issues are isolated or will soon correct as a matter of course. It’s only natural - we don’t want folks to freak out.
Here are a few I'm sure we have all heard:
Customer churn will be reversed with the new feature
Customer churn is not about us, it’s that the customers keep switching jobs
Our product is better, the problem is those clowns at the competition keep giving away their product
People are quitting, but it’s ok - we were going to fire them anyway
We are slow to ship, but that will all change once we rearchitect
Being first to market means we win
Our valuation is low because people just don’t understand how big our TAM is
Our pipeline of new business is the biggest ever and it's fully qualified !
The bad news is, the deal just got delayed ... the good news is it's going to be even BIGGER than we thought!
It's sales' fault
Have you heard any good ones lately?
Ship of Fools (painted c. 1490–1500) is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, now on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
