I think we’ve all encountered the senior manager who has been assigned to “fix” a dysfunctional chunk of the organization. Typically, they come in with a great many ideas, usually born from experiences in other situations, and then they begin to implement the tools that worked elsewhere. There’s often a short period of enthusiasm, if not grudging acceptance, but things tend to slip backwards in time and, eventually, the organization returns to a state very similar to where it began. The problems that the person was facing never really went away, and the attempts at treatment proved to be...
