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为啥大公司也会做出失败的产品或决策

This list could be continued endlessly. Many companies have made mistakes, although wemust assume that employees within those companies saw the mistakes coming.
Obviously, there is a problem of communication between the decision makers and those who can see the mistakes, e.g. a lower level employee or their family or friends.
I have witnessed myself the following case: German electrical giant Siemens used to have mobile phones. They failed to develop clam shell phones which would pop open (likeMotorola StarTAC). Those were very popular at the time in China, but not inGermany. There, the smallest phone was the best phone.
Before Siemens understood what was happening, they lost their market share in China,and with that, so much volume globally that they lost their economy of scale(e.g. leveraging R\u0026amp;D spending, purchasing power etc.), and with that, thewhole Mobile phone business got into difficulties, was eventually sold to BenQand then went bankrupt.
So how could this happen? Siemens had tens of thousands of employees at the time inChina, who exactly knew the taste back then.
1. No Siemens responsible bothered to ask their Chinese employees for their taste. The decisions which mock-up to turn into a production phone was taken in Munich, and the top managers would rather ask their wife’s tastes than to ask a customer on the street, let alone overseas.
2. No Chinese employee dared to speak up. Maybe they did, locally, but their voices were not heard. No one seems to have dared to overstep hierarchy and geography to point out to upper management that they were on the wrong track.
Seems impossible?
Years later, I led a recruiting workshop for university graduates to experiencemanagement consulting first hand for a whole day.
We had prepared a case study where the students should prepare the market entry in China for a home appliance brand from Europe. We formed small groups of 4-5 people.In one group, there were 3 white male engineers and 1 Chinese female computerscientist. The 3 Germans worked furiously, the Chinese stood by and watched.
For me, this picture was a revelation.
At that moment, I believed it was possible that so many people in a large company can still produce bad decisions. They just don\u0026#39;t tap into the talent which they have. And those who know better don\u0026#39;t dare to speak up to make themselves heard.
After a while, as a supervisor, I couldn’t take it anymore: I asked the 3 guys:
“Are you crazy? You are supposed to enter the Chinese home appliance market, and youhave in your team a Chinese girl, potentially the best source you could dreamof, and you don\u0026#39;t include her in the discussion?”
And I asked the girl:
“Why don\u0026#39;t you make the others listen to you? You have all the authority you could wishfor. If you entered consulting, you would be typically in situations where youknow the subject far less, and where it would be much harder to ask for respectto be heard. E.g. if your client is a factory manager with 35 years experience,and you are a consultant 28 years old. If you can\u0026#39;t impose yourself now,when else will you?”


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