Organizations that operate in a dynamic environment must take steps to adapt to their changing circumstances; otherwise, they may collapse entirely. Yet, managers may postpone necessary change to minimize costs, while ignoring the risk that this myopic approach entails to the survival of their organizations. This paper proposes a model that considers failure as a stage-wise process of decline, in which the organization’s portfolio of products and the technological processes that it uses to produce them become increasingly misaligned with market conditions. Eventually, if management fails to adapt to the market in time, the gap between the organization and its environment expands to a point of no return, after which organizational collapse is inevitable. The model enables us to run computerized simulations to predict the lifespan of organizations.

中文翻译：

---

成本最小化与组织生存的悖论

在动态环境中运作的组织必须采取措施以适应不断变化的环境；否则，它们可能会完全崩溃。但是，管理人员可能会推迟进行必要的更改以最大程度地降低成本，而忽略了这种近视处理方法对组织生存的风险。本文提出了一个模型，该模型将故障视为下降的阶段性过程，在该模型中，组织的产品组合及其用于生产产品的技术过程越来越与市场条件失调。最终，如果管理层未能及时适应市场，则组织与其环境之间的差距将扩大到无回报的地步，此后组织崩溃是不可避免的。该模型使我们能够运行计算机模拟来预测组织的寿命。