5 Dysfunctions of a Company

By Leonard Marsden

Have you ever worked for an organization and felt like something was off or dysfunctional? Or an organization that you knew for sure was toxic and dysfunctional? From my twenty-two years in the United States Army, three years as an imbedded contractor, and over eighteen years in manufacturing and from the things that I learned while working on my MBA at the Jack Welch Management School, I have worked the entire spectrum of organizations, from totally dysfunctional to fully functional, and distilled it down to five main categories so that once your recognize them, you can start to improve them or get out of that toxic environment and know what to look for the next time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669810148

Leonard Marsden

Born in Xenia, Ohio, in 1961, Leonard J. Marsden Jr. joined the army two weeks after turning seventeen in 1978. He started a family in 1980, navigated a military career, and helped raise a family of four children, with multiple assignments throughout the world. He turned eighteen in Korea and fifty in Afghanistan. He was kicked out of high school in the eleventh grade and now has an AA in liberal arts, a BS in accounting, and an MBA with a GPA of 3.97. He was part of a four-man team that set a world record in bench pressing back in 1987 and worked as a civilian in organizations, ranging from building liftgates and machines that drove out of the plant and cut down trees to making lip balms and moisturizers and finally bar grating.

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Copyright © 2022 by Leonard Marsden.

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Rev. date: 02/03/2022

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1 Mission/Values

Chapter 2 Strategy

Chapter 3 Leadership

Chapter 4 Communication

Chapter 5 Teamwork

Chapter 6 Situational Awareness Examples

DEDICATION

I owe god for everything good and bad in my life. I am a Christian.

I dedicate this book to my four children, Ashley, John, Mindy, and Robert, for giving me purpose to have the drive to accomplish everything I have done to become the most productive man I could be. I also give credit to Michelle, my former wife, for giving me children who have inspired so much drive, purpose, and determination in me since I became a father.

INTRODUCTION

I am one of the most fortunate men I know. I had the opportunity to join the army when I was seventeen years old back in 1978. Unfortunately, I got to serve the army under President Carter. We couldn’t fight our way out of a paper bag because of Vietnam War battle fatigue, no money, and a weak commander in chief. I was also a part of the military as a young noncommissioned officer, maturing and rising through the ranks during the President Reagan years when we were rebuilding our military. We started training, qualifying with our weapons systems, and fielding great equipment like the M-1 tank and Bradley fighting vehicle and, oh yeah, did we ever start to train, train, and then train again. When I was first introduced to the Second Armored Division in 1982 during the commanding general’s welcoming speech, he promised us three things:

1. Good hard training

2. A lot of good hard training

3. By God, if we did not want to be there in the hard training, he would kick us out of the army because people are knocking on the door to get in (remember what the Jimmy Carter years did to our economy).

Hearing the general speak, I thought I died and went to army heaven. And he kept his promise. We trained, trained, trained, and then trained some more. Standards were raised for everybody. If a leader’s urinalysis revealed drug use, they were out. It was a great time.

I turned eighteen while serving in Yongsan, Korea. On my eighteenth birthday, I received an $18 paycheck because I had been busted down in rank for arguing with an noncommissioned officer after he threatened me and then later in the day running over a Korean with an M880 truck. It was his fault; I signaled, and while I was turning right, he attempted to pass me on the right; wrong answer. And the final blow to the day was my Korean girlfriend running off with all my belongings. I thought wow, all my friends were back home, getting ready to graduate high school, which I had done one month prior to them, and here I was on probably the most memorable birthday in my life. The only way to go from there was up.

Making the army my career, growing and maturing with one of the best organizations in the world, I took for granted things such as mission, values, strategy, training, leadership, communication, and teamwork. That is because it is so ingrained in the culture of the military and I was so steeped in its indoctrination that it became second nature and taken for granted.

Upon retiring from the army as a fresh civilian, I was quickly shocked to find organizations that lacked the basic fundamentals which I long took for granted. It took me some time to diagnose the illnesses of different organizations because like some illnesses, they are buried deep inside of the culture. Some suffered from lacking one or two of the five principles. Unfortunately, I have also encountered companies that lack all five. Man was that fun. It became a problem for me as I stuck around believing I could influence them to improve, and I was wrong. You cannot get a zebra to change its stripes.

I have distilled the dynamics of the basic functions of a company into five major categories, the ones that are the most important functions of an organization and are fundamental to every organization. I have placed them below in order of precedence of importance. In many circumstances, working on one would overlap aligning another area;