Now that I have posted about Google and praised them in several regards I will point
out how silly that is. The Halo Effect is the general belief that because a company is successful it is successful because it is brilliant, innovative, has a great culture, [insert appropriate praise here]. Conversely when that same company stumbles it is because they have "fallen away
from that brilliant, innovative, great culture, [insert appropriate praise here] that made them great. Therefore management books, methods, papers, research, Blogs (heh) are written on this company and how you can be successful like them by following "these 12 easy steps".

The reality of the situation though is rarely that either one of those items is absolutely true. Good companies can have problems, and bad companies can have success. A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly even suggests that "Suggesting that companies can follow a blueprint to achieve lasting success may be appealing, but it’s not supported by the evidence." and "The delusion of lasting success is a serious matter because it casts building an enduringly high-performing company as an achievable objective. Yet companies that outperform the market for long periods of time are not just rare but statistical anomalies whose apparent greatness is observable only in retrospect."

Wow.

This effect is referred to in psychology as the Halo Effect. Just we tend to be nearly binary in how we view others attributing positive traits to those we like and negative traits to those that we don't. Rarely viewing the people with a mix of positive and negative. The book The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers covers this topic in some detail and relates it to businesses

So what does that mean? It means that success is hard... go figure. It means that you need to constantly adjust your strategy and approach to be relevant to the times and business environment in which you find yourself. The approach that got you where you are today simply won't continue to work. It means that if you stand still, you die. From a corporate perspective and a management and directional challenge perspective this is a whopper of a concept.

A great quote on this topic from US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert
E. Rubin “Once you’ve internalized the concept that you can’t prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable
truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding.”

That's almost grounds for a philosophy debate. Up there with "Only the insane have the strength to determine that which is sane."