How Sick is Your Company?

Is your company Passive-Aggressive, Fits-and-Starts, Outgrown, Overmanaged, Just-in-Time, Military Precision, or Resilient? These are the fun categories that make up your organization’s DNA, according to the folks at BAH.
Read the HBR article: The Passive-Aggressive Organization by Gary L. Neilson, Bruce A. Pasternack, and Karen E. Van Nuys.
“Healthy companies are hard to mistake. Their managers have access to good, timely information, the authority to make informed decisions, and the incentives to make them on behalf of the organization, which promptly and capably carries them out. A good term for the healthiest of such organizations is “resilient,” since they can react nimbly to challenges and recover quickly from those they cannot dodge. Unfortunately, most companies are not resilient. In fact, fewer than one in five of the approximately 30,000 individuals who responded to a global online survey Booz Allen Hamilton conducted describe their organizations that way. The largest number—over one-quarter—say they suffer from the cluster of pathologies we place under the label “passive-aggressive.’’ The category takes its name from the organization’s quiet but tenacious resistance, in every way but openly, to corporate directives.
“In passive-aggressive organizations, people pay those directives lip service, putting in only enough effort to appear compliant.”
I used to work for someone like that once. Her strategy was to say yes and do nothing. The result? Nothing happened. Everything I accomplished happened despite of my boss, not because of her. I also knew an entire IT department at a Fortune 500 company that behaved the same way. The modus operandi was: “What can we NOT do today?”

Wait. There’s more.
Here’s a full report on the research – “A Global Check-Up: Diagnosing the Health of Today’s Organizations”