Business Mistake #01

I once worked for a small company that had some early success and became a bigger company. In the smaller company days, as is usual in these situations, the company was a strong team, focused and driven for success. Somewhere along the way to success, the Execs moved away to another building. Same with Customer Support. Engineering had it's own separate building and soon there was born an elite Engineering project that moved further away to their own separate building. Amongst the engineers, cutoff from strategic (and sometimes tactical) direction and cut off from the customers, loss of focus and lack of purpose sunk in.
The ultimate symbol of a disintegrated company appeared one day in the purportedly heartfelt 'goodbye' e-mail that was sent out to the entire company by an executive (whose name was not known to any of the regular engineering staff by the way). I attempted to read the e-mail attachment but could not. The attachment was written in some proprietary format and no one in the engineering department had the software required to read it with.
It was clear, the leaders of the company lived in a different world and communicated amongst themselves in a 'language' that only they could read.
Big mistake.