In This Chapter

• Organizations must constantly change.
• Executives often practice denial.
• Organizations and people regularly fall into the pattern of slow death.
• The way out of slow death is deep change.

Decades ago, I was invited to a meeting of senior officers at a military academy. The general in charge talked at length about the moral decay in society. It turned out that some of the students at the academy were cheating on their exams, and the officers believed that corruption in society was to blame. They argued that by the time some eighteen-year-olds arrived at the academy they were irredeemable.

After a long discussion, I asked whether anyone in the room had served in Vietnam. Most did serve in Vietnam. I asked whether any of them had participated in the phenomenon known as the body count. This was a measurement system used to determine how American forces were performing by counting enemy deaths after each battle. The numbers were often vastly exaggerated.