How well is your company doing? Are you employing the best business practices and doing them well? Is the company committed to its ongoing success? Have you built good relationships with your associates? Are you trusted in your business dealings? And are you as agile as the top performers are? Then you are doing good things and are well on the way to success.Or, are you and your employees failing to own up to problems and neglecting to fix them? Is change passing you by and your competitors are gaining or surpassing you? Does your company encourage performance responsibility and accountability? How are decisions made? Are they usually bad and made repeatedly? Then you are on a bad course and need to make changes before the business becomes a disaster.Worst of all, is there a lack of honesty about how things are going? Are you not owning up to your problems and issues, because that is the way things are done here? How correct are you about knowing what the real problems and issues are? Or are you willing to get other viewpoints and pay attention to them? Are you properly incentivizing people or paying out money that you cannot afford to? Most of all, how good is your communication inside and outside of the company? Do people know what needs to be done and what their roles are? If any of these ugly things are true, you are in big trouble.Peter Christian has worked for and with many companies throughout his 40-year career. He was an executive and trusted business adviser. He has seen businesses succeed or fail. Each category can produce good, bad or ugly results. It all depends upon their utilization and application. The stories are real. Who did or is doing them doesn't matter. What does matter is what to do, how to do it, and why it should be done. It is a matter of success or failure, the choice is yours.