# The Emergence of Zombie Organizations By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-01-03 Many organizations focus on total revenue, which makes sense in many ways. Revenue is how most organizations pay employees and deliver services. However, one can only focus on revenue and still be unable to pay the bills. The math is simple: one must make more than one spends. If an organization only focuses on revenue, it only focuses on what it produces, not on how much it takes to generate that revenue. When organizations realize they cannot pay the bills, they focus on cost-cutting measures. Sometimes, this works, and the same revenue can be generated with less expense. This indicates an operational inefficiency caused by poor management, planning, and performance. Most organizations and business education focus on these situations. Additionally, nearly all analysis is laser-focused on these items. However, what if cutting expenses reduces revenue? In this situation, the organization faces a more significant problem: product-market misalignment. Here, the product or service produced by the organization is not economically valued by the market. This is the beginning of the organization's end, as it is currently understood. No amount of tinkering, managerial hocus pocus, and financial engineering can prevent the organization from transforming. Organizations are ill-equipped to deal with these situations because they are existential crises that require progressing beyond the status quo, and organizations are structurally designed to maintain the status quo. As a result, most organizations facing this situation will transform from living to dead. But right before they die, they'll exist in a state of the living dead that will propagate to everyone within that organization. Employees will mill about mindlessly doing only trivial tasks until the horde is alerted to a "brain." These brains are the last good ideas or a new employee who doesn't know better. Suddenly, all of the zombies will run to gobble up the brain, effectively killing any hope of finding something better. Eventually, all energy will be exhausted, and the organization will die, but it might take years. If one finds themselves a zombie within a zombie organization, it's best to act like all the other zombies until one finds a window to escape. #### Related Items [[Organization]] [[Work]] [[Economics]] [[Value]] [[Survive]] [[Management]] [[Business]]