Boiled Frog Phenomenon
What is the Boiled Frog phenomenon?
First of all this refers to killing a frog, if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water the poor creature will fight and jump and claw to try and get out of the danger of dying. If with the same situation you ease the frog into warm water and turn the flame up slowly then the frog will not fight because it will not sense any immediate danger and it will ease into death (ezinearticles.com). This basically means that the frog senses no danger and is lulled into a false sense of security. This could very easily happen in business because for example if you see someone stealing $100.00 from your company then you would freak out and fire the person and fight to keep your business going but if the same person is taking a dollar a day from the company you would never know and the person would still be getting away with the same thing, it would just take longer to get the same result. This simply means that companies need to watch for the small things that could have a big impact before it gets to that point. There is an old quote that rings true in this situation and that is “If you take care of the small things then the big things will take care of themselves.”
How does it apply to business and strategic management?
This applies to businesses when they think they are doing really good and something they are not expecting hurts them. One of the best examples of this is Worldcom because the CEO and other workers were taking money from the company and at first it was not noticed but the more they got greedy the more noticeable it became. Now I am sure that nobody was expecting this to happen so this would be like putting the frog into tepid water and letting it slowly die. Another example of this relating to the world in general was when 9/11 happened, everyone had thought we were ready for a terrorist attack and when the twin towers went down it threw us all into a sense of shock and that was more like throwing the frog into
First of all this refers to killing a frog, if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water the poor creature will fight and jump and claw to try and get out of the danger of dying. If with the same situation you ease the frog into warm water and turn the flame up slowly then the frog will not fight because it will not sense any immediate danger and it will ease into death (ezinearticles.com). This basically means that the frog senses no danger and is lulled into a false sense of security. This could very easily happen in business because for example if you see someone stealing $100.00 from your company then you would freak out and fire the person and fight to keep your business going but if the same person is taking a dollar a day from the company you would never know and the person would still be getting away with the same thing, it would just take longer to get the same result. This simply means that companies need to watch for the small things that could have a big impact before it gets to that point. There is an old quote that rings true in this situation and that is “If you take care of the small things then the big things will take care of themselves.”
How does it apply to business and strategic management?
This applies to businesses when they think they are doing really good and something they are not expecting hurts them. One of the best examples of this is Worldcom because the CEO and other workers were taking money from the company and at first it was not noticed but the more they got greedy the more noticeable it became. Now I am sure that nobody was expecting this to happen so this would be like putting the frog into tepid water and letting it slowly die. Another example of this relating to the world in general was when 9/11 happened, everyone had thought we were ready for a terrorist attack and when the twin towers went down it threw us all into a sense of shock and that was more like throwing the frog into
References: Ezine Articles (2010) The Boiled Frog Phenomenon retrieved from http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Boiled-Frog-Phenomenon&id=932310 Self growth (2010) Are we becoming a Nation of boiled frogs? Retrieved from http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Genett1.html