Schadenfreude: delight in another person's misfortune. There's something about the failure of others that works like a magnet.
b|net understands this as well as everyone else and posted a feature today, The 10 Worst Business Ideas of All Time.
9. Set new strategy and expect employees to feel empowered to make it happen.
The fundamental problem here is that planned change and empowerment cancel each other out. Planned change relies on an external source of change: do this because I said so. Empowerment says "find your passion and do that." So combining them in this way is just mumbo-jumbo. [more]
This one hits home for me because I've worked at plenty of large companies where the executive leadership experienced some sort of revelation and then decided to turn the company on a dime in an entirely different direction proving that its far easier to do it right the first time than to get it wrong and then try to fix it.
The other thing we read in point nine is that it's difficult to get employees, who enlisted in one company, to re-enlist them in the new direction. Remember, the new direction is either an opportunity that was overlooked on an attempt to recover from a mistake. Either way, this isn't a confidence building experience.
