general motors alfred sloan created a culture of arrogance today both walmart and microsoft have gone down the same route once arrogance sets in the company it becomes abusive on customers suppliers employees and the community at large microsoft for instance began to dictate terms to trade partners and end customers then it became abusive of suppliers the application software guys in walmarts case it was unthinkable for a small company like that to succeed where there were giants such as sears and kmart they began by nurturing everyone properly for instance by offering end consumers better brands at lower price but later they became abusive with success says sheth the noonecanbeat me syndromesuccess breeds complacency remember air india of the 1970s on any measure you can possibly imagine be it capacity financial performance or customer service it was easily one of the best in the world once it was nationalised it became complacent and started to collapse complacency usually comes when you are a monopoly because you have no competition it comes in public enterprises too says sheth adding that it also happens when you have monopoly over distribution de beers for instance is a classic example they started dictating terms to mining people their suppliers and also diamond cutters and began to say we control everything growth pangswhen you become a successful company you become large and need to organise stuff so you put in place processes and people its essentially how you create a culture of failure essentially over the long term by being a culture of success these are habits you acquire as a side effect of being successful says sheth so internal turf wars begin three dimensional turf wars are very common so there are functional turf wars where engineering doesnt work well with sales and marketing who in turn dont work well with functional support people then there are turf wars between geography heads or country managers versus functional heads or country managers against product managers take wpp which grew through acquisitions all the ad agencies or public relations agencies they bought were founderdriven they have never worked together its like herding cats so as a group sir martin sorrell has to manage all of them they dont fight says sheth but wars are going on and saatchi saatchi has collapsed in the process in the case of wpp when the founders culture is subsumed within the larger corporate culture turf wars begin he says or take motorola which is largely engineering driven fights happen between engineering and sales and marketing they had a tough time making the transition from being a technologydriven to marketing driven company he adds when competency becomes liabilityremember techtronics perhaps no the reason being techtronics clung to its competency even after it became irrelevant greater the competency you have that no one can duplicate greater that competency becomes a trap for you when you are very good at whatever you did you