by Martin Chu, COPYRIGHTED
                                                                                      Original created August 1 2009
                                                                                      Last Update July 4 2012

     Note: I did not take the above picture, Mr. Chang Po-Chung is the owner of the above photo.

(1) Company does not have a clear and consistent product, development, technology strategy, custom service guideline.  There is no clear and correct roadmap/direction for company.

(2) There is no strong leadership, determination, skill set, openness and vision at top management, leadership team and/or board of directors. Company top leadership and board members only operate and focus on short term business goal. This short term goal is normally less than three years.

(3) Company does not have a consistent quality policy or have one but not really seriously enforce it. It will sell any products at compromised quality even internally know the issues.  Company's Quality and reputation can give away for short term profit or unrealistic delivery or development schedule.

(4) Company does not have an clear idea about its own competitive edge and its own weakness. These can be in technology, manufacturing, marketing, sale channel, operation efficiency.  It also does not have an clear understanding about competivity landscape and specific and/or general market direction.

(5) Company management especially top management do not know or monitor important strategic programs inside company. This also shown up in no traceability, and accountability in all/some sectors of company's activities. These means product documents, design specification, design project, tool control, quality control policy, archive procedure, product development and release and internal audit procedure etc.  

(6) Company has strong finger pointing culture and political/game playing environment. Company's energy and resource are consumed in a lot of buratic and counter-productive activities. Whoever individual or group has connections with top management and/or loud voice can  take up other people's credit or finger pointing to other people or group.

(7) Company has double standard in some or all area of its business. It says one thing but do the other thing, publicly or even under table. They are not consistent about their corporate behavior, image or action in a serious fashion.

(8) The company is also too complacent about their product, technology, business operation,  and market position. Company does not encourage constructive risk taking. It only keep status quote and does not have determination to make improvement and changes., even important and/or critical issues have been identified. Also company does not invest in productivity enhancement and employee skill set improvement.

(9) Company does not have an open, consistent, efficient, unbiased review and evaluation system to ensure the interest of company as a whole is protected. It  does not reward or encourage pursue of excellence, instead it is punishing any project conflict with current establishment. Medicore and status Quota are the norm inside a ordinary and decaying company.

* Company does not make efforts to ensure that the company has the right characteristics, environment and system in place for its members to dedicate, contribute and be part of it. The ordinary company can not envirgour its employee to feel excited or worthwile for extra effort.  Company treats its employee with very little respect and use them as a handy tool at most. 

(10) Company does not encourage, foster, create  and reward a knowledge sharing system. The same mistakes can happen over and over again.  It does not have or maintain a system  to learn from previous mistakes and avoid them. Mistakes in circuit design, mask making, new technology development, device testing  and Fab happened over and over again. No accurate traceability and accountability for the main cause. And no accountability for reoccurance of stupid and aviodable mistakes.    

(11) Company has too many special interest groups inside. These special interest groups only care about  their individual or group  benefit. They can sacrifice or delay other groups' advance to  thiner advantage. Company allows few groups taking control of key projects and other groups' credit. Company also only foster and financially funding in a very biased fashion.   

(12) Company has no or had convoluted project management and tracking system.   Also  no correct and accurate responsibility/accountability of long and fail design and/or development projects. All kind of projects no matter that new technology, new product development or new tool adoption are  over due or non-finished. Nobody responsible for those failures and/or nothing was try to do to correct those problems or issues. 


So if you identify your company has some of the above issues, what you want do about it.
Make up you mind to fix it first, set up time line to address and correct the issues, hire outside independent, competent  and honest auditor to review the overall situation. Once the issues have been identified setup priority and make up a strong team to execute all the necessary changes. Smoothly trim and get rid of all the road blocks in the way of reform.