Elephants on the conference room table is my metaphor for the obstacles (usually people and organizational) plaguing corporate America today and preventing growth in enterprise value. Almost always, these elephants are allowed to interfere with business success, while people avert their eyes, pretending they do not exist.
These elephants include disrespectful and rude behavior, focus-diverting people; absence of clear direction; lack of accountability; failure to follow up; and, the ever popular elephant - inability to execute. Easily seen, they are the elephants sitting on the conference room table. They live long organizational lives, seemingly immune to accountability and true performance measures, and therefore erode the CEO's credibility—to the CEO's detriment and that of the company.
It has been my experience that the most frequently ignored elephants are clearly apparent yet unresolved people, management and organizational issues. It follows then that these people centered issues, which management refuses to identify and address, inevitably lead to other weaknesses, and are the root cause of failure to perform throughout the organization. The effective organization identifies these elephants, accepts the reality that they prevent the organization from achieving their goals, and removes them (or reassigns them) so they can no longer hurt the organization or its people. |
