Organizational Failure Quotes

Over the last decade the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge, and cannot do any better today.

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.

The State Department is the kind of organization which though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

The CIA is a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.

When it comes to the assignment of blame, the CIA has by and large been a luckless organization.

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

The CIA has become a hollow shell of words without deeds

The United Nations is a mess, riddled with scandals. In fact, the U.N. itself is a scandal.

Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it's in there.

(The) chain of command has failed over the years, obviously, for a lot of reasons.

The nepotism there is the stuff of legend... It just seems to be a place where people get paid to sit in a building.

Government does not have basic business sense.

Management does not know what a system is.

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

It’s [the CIA’s] broken. It’s so broken that nobody wants to believe it.

But I made no efforts to organize my supporters to hold on to the apparatus. Consequently I was soon expelled and my followers, who did not change coats overnight, quietly left or were expelled from the party.

It is interesting that so many people who become disenchanted, who protest against their own organizations, are people who contributed something to them and then saw how it was misused.

Bureaucracy is more people doing less things, and taking more time to do them worse.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.