When a founder starts a company, profit is a distant dream. If a company is founded solely for the purpose of making profits, the founder is going to be disappointed . There are no profits in a start up and as far as the long run is concerned, it is not promised nor assured. 95% of startup bite the dust. A healthy start-up is one in which the founders started the company because they identified a need in the marketplace that was either not being satisfied at all, or that they believed they could satisfy better than others. With a start-up, the purpose of building a company is to satisfy a need.

The concept called “span of control,” refers to how many people report directly to you in your organization? Usually, this question is relevant for a Go-Go company where, since the start-up stage, everyone in the company reported to the CEO. He or she continues to hold on to this responsibility, even as the company is expanding and growing and changing.

Everything in this world is system. You as a human being, you are a system. A family is a business. A country is and so is business. The globe, planet is a system called an ecosystem. By definition, every system is comprised of subsystems. A company has a marketing subsystem, sales subsystem, production subsystem, financial, human, capital subsystems. A human being has the nervous subsystem, the blood flow subsystem, the respiratory subsystem, etcetera. And a country has the legal subsystem, the economic subsystem, the technological subsystem, the social subsystem.

Healthy Company How and Why?Presentation by Prof. Ichak Adizes to Merge FoundationAll these achievements I could not do if I was not healthy. So, how should we produce profits in the short and the long run? By being healthy. If the organization is not healthy, it cannot produce the profits. Maybe it can produce in the short run, but it will not be sustainable. I started asking myself : "What does it mean to have a healthy company?"

The meaning of the word “development” has been debated. Indeed, the World Bank has essentially stopped using the terms “developing” and “developed”—first because they are fraught with misunderstanding; but also because countries no longer fit neatly into one of the two categories. Plus, there are disputes about how to measure standards, with GDP very much out of fashion, while “multiple modernities” has become a focus of controversy about what to count and how to achieve it. Nations can succeed in some ways but not in others. It’s not a smooth divide, nor is it a smooth path.

The purpose, the goal of Communism was ultimate justice and happiness: All people will be equal; there will be no exploitation of other people. And what happened? Millions of kulaks, land-owners, were killed, and the nation of Ukraine was starved. Millions of people were sent to the gulags, where they suffered or perished. What went wrong? The goal was so pure.

When I lecture in Russia, my PowerPoints and I are translated into Russian, so I have learned that the words for “power” and “government” are the same: vlast. In other words, government and power are one and the same, presuming that the only power is with the government, and the people have no power. Ponder the political meaning of that.

What causes problems, why they become chronic, and why companies need external help. With the Big Bang, the universe became one huge web of systems composed of subsystems, which in themselves are composed of their own subsystems. With the Big Bang time and space started and as time advances, change occurs but the subsystems do not change at the same speed. The change is not synchronous. Some subsystems change faster than others.