The "Silent Killers" of business success

Abstract

Dr. Michael (Mike) Beer, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, explains the “silent killers” of business success that top management are unaware of. For the past forty years, I and my colleagues at TruePoint, a management consulting firm I co-founded, have worked with courageous leaders willing to enable truth to speak to power - them and their top team - about barriers to their organization’s effectiveness and performance. Hundreds of organizations across the globe, in many different industries, in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, have reported the same syndrome of seven highly interdependent barriers. We have called these barriers the “silent killers” of learning and change because, like hypertension and cholesterol in the human body, they are hidden barriers to organizational health and effectiveness.