When something goes wrong, the human tendency is to find external forces to blame (or someone else). When there is success, there is a tendency to ignore the fact that external forces had helped in that success.
For example, when some organizations have a great year of revenue, senior management would take all the credit for their strategy and marketing efforts and would make no reference to the fact that the economy was buoyant and/or how favorable foreign exchange rates helped in the equation (weak pound translates into more sales revenue from overseas markets). On the contrary, if all goes bad then there is a plethora of excuses, from the bad economy to the weather and of course inflation and a shift in exchange rates. All failure is attributed to external forces. It is the nature of the beast (human being) to take full credit for success and blame everybody else and the external factors for failure. The human imagination is not short of ideas for a cover-up for failure.
Some CEOs take great performance for their success, like 100% of it was attributable to the CEOs initiatives – but none or little credit is given to those who helped in the process. Words like “I like to thank my staff for contributing to this success” are a nice gesture, but falls short of the fact that the CEOs influence may have been marginal.
Take the case of the bustling economy of the 1990s – investors, company directors and CEOs attributed success to their very own abilities. Every dumb investor made money in the market (because the market went up and up) and gloated over their success without giving any credit to external influences. Every man and woman on the street was suddenly successful investors. It is also now evident that the success in the 90s was fraught with corruption, deceit and corporate scandals and a lot of fools who follow the crowd mentality. Part of corruption is when CEO's or boards set targets that are unattainable and when those targets cannot be reached they fiddle with the numbers to make the targets.
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