🪦 The Turkish School of Management: How to Confidently Sink Your Business — Harmful Advice
Let me shift the topic for a moment from taxes and macroeconomics to what I see constantly in my day-to-day work. Building a business in Türkiye is tough: uncertainty, expensive capital, exchange rate pressures, and fierce competition hit all at once.
Yet here is what practice reveals. Carefully nurtured companies perish more often not from an external blow, but from within—from the repetitive decisions of the owner themselves. Sometimes a company is sunk not by the market, but by the management style of its proprietor.
1. The most common way to slowly kill your firm is a culture of fear.
When the owner sees a mistake in everything, constantly criticizing and reprimanding, employees stop taking responsibility. Strong professionals fall silent; the best talent departs. In the short run, this resembles discipline, but over the long haul, it destroys both learning and loyalty.
2. Closely related to this is the habit of seeking advice only from others who are equally stuck.
Instead of relying on proven methodologies (data, business processes, risk management, internal controls), the owner listens to fellow business owners wrestling with the very same problems, claiming that "those consultants simply don't understand our industry." As a result, everyone stews together in the same dead end.
3. Next—and in my observations, this is the most quintessentially Turkish trait—is one-man rule.
I know everything myself, all decisions are mine, and all authority rests with me. The owner mistakes the company's total dependency on them for indispensability and success. They do not build scalable processes, data infrastructure, internal controls, or a sound corporate governance system. But the mechanics are straightforward: the larger the company grows, the worse it functions on manual control, and when the owner burns out, the entire firm exhausts itself.
4. A separate chapter: the attitude toward people and ideas.
When an employee is treated merely as a line item on an expense sheet and someone else's idea is perceived only as a threat, what follows is predictable. Staff are not developed; they are micromanaged and, at the first opportunity, cut as an expense. No second-tier management or succession pipeline is prepared, justified by the notion that "they wouldn't understand anyway." In doing so, the company systematically deprives itself of both intellect and a future.
5. And the financial signature.
Instead of differentiating through the product, they slash prices. Decisions are made emotionally, out of spite toward competitors. Corporate funds and company assets are spent on personal whims under the pretext that "it's all mine anyway," while profits, rather than being reinvested into the product, brand, talent, and operational capacity, are dissipated across unrelated side ventures. Where capital and human resources are unfocused, the company itself cannot remain focused.
The good news is that this is not a life sentence. A management climate can be transformed in months rather than years: streamline processes, make operational data visible, separate authority and accountability, establish internal controls, and groom a second tier of leadership. In the long run, a company is sustained by far more than the boldness, intuition, and decision-making speed of its founder. Without systems, robust data, and a capable team, the very energy that once built the business eventually turns into the force that runs it into the ground.
If you recognized your company here even halfway, that is no reason to despair. It is a compelling reason to pause and re-engineer your corporate governance before the market does it for you.