332
n
The success trap (and some ideas how to get out of it)
you try to squeeze it into your own version of reality, rather than
accept that reality itself has changed. But reality is that one day
the likes of industry giants like Google, Intel, or Microsoft will
go down. Because as Heraclitus already said
some ve centuries
bc: “panta rhei” (every-
thing ows); and “In the end, there is only
ux, everything gives way”.
Tunnel vision is of course not only restricted
to organizations in the world of business.
One pertinent example, I have always
thought, concerned Operation Market Garden, an operation by
the Allied forces during World War II.
Operation Market Garden
My father was a young boy during World War II. He grew up in
a small village in the Netherlands just south of the river Maas
which, parallel to two arms of the river Rhine, ows from east
to west, cutting the country in half. In 1944, while the Allied
forces were moving north, approaching the Netherlands from
Belgium after having landed in Normandy, the barn behind
his home served as a makeshift German army hospital, while
their commanders took up headquarters in the family’s living
room. When the German soldiers left, the barn lled up with
wounded Allied soldiers instead, and the German commanders
at his dinner table were replaced by their English-speaking
counterparts.
He never told me about what he saw in the barn. He did recall
with fondness the sweets and cigarettes the soldiers used to
give him (he was 10 years old), Germans and Americans alike.
Anyway, he used to tell me about the operations that the Allied
forces conducted to get across the big rivers, trying to advance
into the north of the Netherlands. One of them was Operation
Market Garden. It was a huge operation, involving some 35,000
troops, in which soldiers, weaponry, vehicles, and equipment
were dropped near bridges crossing the three rivers, to occupy
‘‘
In the end,
there is only flux,
everything gives
way.
’’
Business Exposed34
and hold them while the Allied forces advanced through the
south of the Netherlands, preventing the German troops from
blowing them up.
Years later, I saw the (apparently very accurate) lm A Bridge too
Far, starring Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Robert
Redford, Sean Connery, and Anthony Hopkins; clearly, a 1970s’
star cast.
I had become a professional student of organizations by then,
having accepted a position as an assistant Professor of Strategy
at the London Business School. It was then that I was struck by
the similarities between the processes that lead up to spectacular
business failures and the processes that made Operation Market
Garden a disaster.
Because Operation Market Garden was a huge failure. It became
one of the biggest massacres of the whole war; more people died
in Operation Market Garden than on D-Day itself. The Allied
forces did not manage to hold the third bridge at Arnhem, and it
took another eight months before the north of the Netherlands
was liberated; during the preceding winter, thousands of people,
cut off from the agricultural lands of the south, perished in a
famine known as “the hungerwinter”.
Yet, the commanders in charge of the operation had received
many early warning signs that it was going to be a challenge:
perhaps a bridge too far. The Dutch Resistance had sent coded
messages that at least one German tank division was located
unexpectedly close to the Allied forces’ drop zone (their warnings
were ignored); English spy-plane pictures examining the drop
zones had taken photographs of the tanks (the photographs
were brushed aside); ofcers and a general had expressed doubts
about the preparations for the operation (their hesitations were
dismissed); and soldiers questioned whether the radios, to be
used for vital co-ordination and communication on the ground,
would work (they didn’t).
So why did the general in charge of the operation (General
Browning) ignore all these warning signs? Well, for the same
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