Quote Originally Posted by Roy Karrde View Post
Yes if a company is failing, it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt from the bottom up.
Hooray, finally my grad school major appears in a TPM thread! Org behavior bot here we go!

If a company is failing, what will fix it? Change--a huge element of performance management. How is change most successful? Change from the top down. Change starts with leadership change, and not necessarily turnover. Turnover is an element of change that will come naturally as those who are resistant to change (higher customer service ratings as a change initiative for example) begin to stand out and either receive poor performance reviews and fail to advance, or leave the company due to disappointment in the change initiatives. Change also takes several years but adequate performance management on its own can increase productivity and performance by a fairly reliable 25 percent, other factors (job duties, etc.) staying the same.

You can't just get rid of all the lower-level employees, start over and call it change. If nothing about the culture changes, then the things that led to employee failure are still present in the organizational culture. You can't say, "My business is failing. It is because all of my employees except me can't do their job! Exterminate! EXTERMINATE *Dalek explosion*" That model does not lead to future success and will cause old problems to reappear in the future.

And this is all just the bare bones on organizational change...