“If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open – without destroying ourselves in the process.” – Ed Catmull

To be successful in today’s highly competitive marketplace, your business must be flexible, innovative and customer friendly. Businesses that are inflexible and difficult to do business with are destined to fail.

Quite a few years ago, I was called by a client and asked to take over an engineering project that they had awarded to one of our competitors. This competitor was not meeting the requirements of the contract and not delivering on schedule or on budget. Once I got involved with the project and did some investigating, I discovered the biggest reason for their failure was they were stuck using their rigid project execution processes that added cost and complexity without returning any value. This competitor was stuck in their rigid, inflexible and bureaucratic structure and could not find a way to break out of it even though they were self-destructing!