How to destroy your company – Part I: Managers

Have you ever wondered why a company goes bankrupt? Especially the ones that are “too big to fail”? There any many different factors, but today we're going to focus on feckless managers. If you want to destroy your company, you should hire managers who meet the following criteria:

Managers who do not understand metrics and KPI's. They'll never know which of their collaborators work well and which don't. So they'll shift work from the “slow” workers to the quick ones – they don't care about their workers' indivual performance, they just want to meet the objectives fixed by their superiors. Dont' worry: your good workers will soon start looking for a new job and leave the company asap.

If the desk clerk speaks English better than the 95% of the managers, you're on the right track: your company will go bankrupt soon because it won't undergo any innovation. English is today's Latin – if you want to know what's going on around the globe, you have to speak English (and other languages if possible).

If all the company's managers studied at the same university or business school, are about the same age and are from the same country (in the case of a multinational corporation), you can be pretty sure that most of the managers weren't hired for their professional skills... seeing that working hard makes no sense because you don't belong to their “caste” and one will never be promoted is the best way to motivate your company's workforce.

Managers who hold meetings all day long: Well this is what managing is all about, right? Managing is just telling somebody else what he's got to do. Your managers should hold several meetings a day, assign new tasks to their employees and leave at 5pm at the latest... and your employees will keep on working until 7pm or 8pm – they're lucky because they've got a job. So, no complaints please...

What else can you think of?