Firms that experience poor or deteriorating global competitiveness generally suffer from a number of organisational diseases. These diseases originate from internal business management practices or are caused by the dynamics of the market and the intrusion of governments.
Organisational diseases can be explained in terms of the human body and its habitat. The human body is under constant threat of cancers, genetically encoded sicknesses, viruses, bacteria, toxins and injuries. When the body is poorly managed or maintained, these threats turn into attacks on the body and affect it in a variety of ways. Some cancers, viruses, bacteria and toxins that attack the human body cause diseases or health conditions that can be arrested and remedied. Others prove to be unstoppable and incurable when current medicinal practices are applied, and lives are lost prematurely.
This same phenomenon applies to organisations, irrespective of whether they are small companies or global corporations. All organisations have a prevailing state of health and a history of good health, ailments, illnesses and trauma. One could go into the archives of any company that has been around for more than three years and extract and interpret a chain of events that would reflect the organisational health record of the company for the period. The most powerful and prestigious companies in the world today have all experienced oscillations between trauma and joy in the course of their existence and will continue to do so.
It would be wonderful if business management scientists, leaders and managers could arrive at a state of competence that would empower them to monitor, assess, predict and direct an organisation’s condition of health or competitiveness reliably and successfully. We rely extensively on financial measures to determine the health of organisations, but this is like measuring the vital signs of the body, such as pulse, body temperature, blood pressure and breathing. When vital signs are abnormal, something has brought this on and doctors are usually in a position to diagnose the cause of the abnormality. In the case of organisational abnormality, the vital functions and system components of the organisation as well as the diagnostic processes and instruments, and even the types of abnormalities, their causes and treatments are poorly defined. We should be able to practise preventative and rehabilitative organisational medicine, if only we could identify and define the internal and environmental influences and conditions that cause contamination, poisoning, infection and physical functional collapse or death of organisations. Unfortunately we practise neither of these forms of medicine particularly well in an organisational context, because the science of organisational health management is still underdeveloped.
We could start some progress on the developmental life cycle of organisational health management science by identifying only the terminal diseases that strike organisations and theorising about how these are caused, diagnosed, treated and prevented. Much more effort will have to go into identifying the abnormalities and ailments that occur in organisations and describing how these should be diagnosed and treated.
I believe that there are nine terminal diseases that strike organisations and I choose to think of them as cancers and viruses on the basis of origin. Cancers are generally internally induced while viruses are externally induced. Cancers are spread in organisations through communication and policies similar to the way they are spread in the body by the blood circulation. Cancers attack the morale and attitudes of workers. Viruses originate from the outside environment of the organisation; they attack and erode the generators of revenue streams and profitability of organisations in the way that viruses attack organs of the body.
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