5 More Mistakes The Empire Made

The snow is falling, people are dreaming of skiing or snowboarding, Santa, and Christmas presents so this is a perfect time to talk about Star Wars with the recent release of The Rise of Skywalker! We’re continuing our ongoing trend of discussing more mistakes the Empire made in their business model/galactic reign. Because while they almost destroyed the only resistance to their regime, we all know how the story ends.

Last time we explored the specific mistakes of Darth Vader, but this time ‘round we’ll explore the overall mistakes of the Empire itself. And while you might look at them and say, “That’s ridiculous! There’s no way I’d ever make that mistake in my company,” you’d be surprised at the parallels to real life in the business world.

#5. Not Training Your Employees to Be the Best Version of Themselves

 “Stormtroopers,” the word brings to mind a giant army of white and black clad soldiers that are a formidable force in the galaxy. Well, they would be, if they could hit a star destroyer directly beside them with their gun held directly against the hull. While some are actually clones, the vast majority are, in fact, human conscripts. This means the majority of the army wasn’t trained to shoot well and never had follow-up training sessions—obviously they weren’t sending out enough memos.

In your own business, training your employees is crucial to the long term success of any company. In a lot of ways, your employees are the lifeblood of your business and treating them as disposable is the fastest way for them to build some kind of union or rebellion against you and rise up to destroy your own empire. That might be a little bit dramatic, but this brings us to mistake number four . . .

#4. Underestimating Your Competition

Image Credit: Star Wars Episode IV

Understand, there is a difference between underestimating your competition and being paranoid about their every move. In the case of the Empire, they didn’t think a bunch of walking, talking teddy bears with primitive technology would pose a threat to their technologically superior army. Not only that, they figured a bunch of loosely cobbled together upset civilians would in no way have a chance against their clearly superior weaponry and numbers. Boy were they wrong.

Never assume you’re the best in the industry because no one has a better product or service than you at this particular moment. That can quickly change. All it takes is one new innovation from a competitor and your entire product line or service could become obsolete. It’s also just as bad of an idea to think another company isn’t capable of overshadowing your success. Stay on top of the news of your competition and don’t let them get the drop on you. Otherwise you might have a “harmless” ewok metaphorically bashing in the head of your business.

#3. Buying/Designing Expensive Products With Clear Flaws

Image Credit: Star Wars Episode V

To be fair, it’s hard to plan for space wizards magically shooting a missile into a tiny hole. Especially when it has to travel perfectly straight for several kilometers into the most vulnerable part of your basically-impossible-to-destroy-base. Flaws in other just as “indestructible” and “unbeatable” vehicles and spaceships extend across the Empire’s army. How about a four-legged walking tank that can be defeated by tying up it’s legs? Or a giant spaceship where a smaller ship can just hide on the back and be undetectable by radar? What about a biped tank that can easily be tripped and destroyed by wooden logs? Honestly, for one of the most powerful armies in the galaxy they made some terrible design choices.

This lesson in poor design extends to your own company—especially in terms of products. Whether it’s your own products made from cheap materials, or buying expensive software that doesn’t do the one thing you need it to do really well—quality is important. Always strive to give the best value possible to the customer or client. People might not always talk about good products, but they will definitely rant about bad ones, both online and to their friends. And if you want to recover from a situation like that you should take heed of our next point . . .

#2. Never Trying to Improve Their Image

Image Credit: Star Wars Episode VI

If you’re taking over the world, galaxy, or universe, it might seem unnecessary to try and have good public relations, but by ruling through fear the Empire really botched up their success. Trying to run, well, an empire, works best when you have a good public image, and that’s quickly going to go down the drain when you start annihilating planets and enslaving alien races. Plus, people don’t like living in fear so there was ample reason for them to rebel.

Good PR is important to any company, big or small. Whether it’s improving your image from volunteer work, or holding events, creating an organization with a good public image can make all the difference. Not only that, but with strong public relations you can also improve your brand awareness and even potentially motivate people to engage with you on platforms like social media.

1. Building a Poor Chain of Command

Image Credit: Star Wars Episode III

This may be one of the single greatest failings of the Empire—just letting the Emperor run everything! Sure, clear leadership from a single source can create inspiration, and improve morale, but one person can’t be everywhere at once. Relying entirely on a single person’s decisions in a large army doesn’t make sense when you reach an empire-level scale. Not least of which, they just stopped fighting after the Death Star blew up—without a solid chain of command they just assumed they lost even though they still had plenty of ships to take on the Rebels. No one took charge, and thus they lost the war.

Your own business will eventually get to a point where you can’t be there or answer all the emails from it, and at that point you need to set up how it will function if you’re gone. People need to know who they should report to about decisions, and be empowered enough to make those decisions themselves when someone higher up can’t be reached. Setting up a clear chain of command is important to any business and ensures things continue to run smoothly when higher-ups are, for example, thrown down a galactic exhaust port.

Clearly, we could’ve been much better Empire rulers. Now, we just need to learn how to use a lightsaber . . .

2019-12-19T19:43:53+00:00December 19th, 2019|0 Comments

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