Take Part In The Revelation Survey Into Corporate Politics, Hidden Agendas and Manipulation In

Online, August 29, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Revelation Consulting Ltd have announced the launch of their latest survey into the cost of corporate politics, hidden agendas and manipulation in business, and the results will be incorporated into a new book on the subject, due out later this year.

Peter Freeth, one of Revelation's directors, says, "A huge number of people are affected by these issues, but because they are hidden, they've been hard to quantify. We're continually developing new ways of measuring the business impact of manipulation, and in one defence engineering company, we calculated the cost as £16 Million per year. Whilst these issues are awkward to tackle, they do reach a point where executives have no choice but to sit up and take action, or face the dire consequences of allowing a minority of staff and managers to bring the company down."

Well publicised cases such as Enron and Worldcom focus on the details of financial misreporting, however this is just the end result of a long chain of events that begins with weak management control that makes it easier to hide problems that confront and resolve them.

Stepheni Smith, Revelation's other director, says, "At the engineering company, we found so many different facets to the problem. Directors were fabricating monthly reports, projects were massively over budget and staff just came and went as they pleased with managers almost afraid to take action. The situation was getting completely out of control, and the worst part of it was that the directors knew most of what was happening, and dealt with it by burying their heads in the sand and falsifying reports to cover up the growing problem. To solve the huge under-performance issues, they were spending more and more money each month on contract staff to try to prop up the failing projects, but in fact they were making the situation worse by avoiding dealing with it."

Revelation is a consultancy that investigates these and similar issues and helps managers and executives to regain control and restore business performance.

"When a management team's control starts to weaken, staff push the boundaries more and more to see what they can get away with. It's human nature, but that doesn't mean that it's acceptable. Whilst staff will tend to do what their managers allow them to get away with, it's entirely up to the managers to choose where to draw that line", Smith adds. "Our job is to help managers to get back the control that they have given away so that they can manage the business and deliver results. We're not saying it's easy, because the more control that managers give away, the harder they have to work to win it back. But it is absolutely worth the time and effort, and the alternative is that the company will ultimately fail."

The survey is available at kwiksurveys.com?u=revelation2011 and the results will be published at the end of September.