Anatomia Defectus: What Two Decades Inside MENA's Most Dysfunctional Organizations Taught Me About Failure

By RACHID BOUTCHICHA

In 2017, a multi-million-dollar oil and gas company in Iraq ground to a halt. Not because of a production failure, a financial crisis, or a safety incident. The CEO's WhatsApp had stopped working.
What followed - a cascade of vice presidents, managers, and senior executives flooding the company group chat with praise for the IT team, while the company's actual operations collapsed around them - became, for the author, the defining image of two decades spent inside some of the most instructive organizational failures in the Middle East and North Africa.
Anatomia Defectus is the account of those failures - examined honestly, analyzed rigorously, and told entirely from the inside.
Rachid Boutchicha spent more than twenty years working across six real organizations in Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, and Gabon - from a bankrupt water treatment company to a global energy giant with a forty-billion-dollar market value. What he found, across all of them, was the same set of patterns repeating with the consistency of natural law: the communication breakdowns disguised as politeness, the organizational structures built for appearance rather than function, the leaders more focused on their private elevator than their company's survival, the corporations that proclaimed their values loudly while quietly violating every one of them.
This is not a book about success. It is a systematic, experience-grounded diagnosis of why organizations fail - and a frank account of what those failures reveal about the cultural, structural, and human forces that shape business life in one of the world's most consequential and least honestly examined regions.
What you will find in these pages: Organizational dysfunction at its most vivid: A front-row seat to the absurdities and blind spots that paralyze massive enterprises.Beneath the Surface: Why collective ignorance - not bad luck or incompetence - is the true root cause of institutional failure in the region.The corporate lifecycle: The phases through which international corporations systematically absorb and discard their people - and why you may already be in one of them.The Mozabite exception: how one Algerian community built a model of collective success in the same environment that destroyed everything around it.The Kingdom of the Giant Corporate: What Boeing, and a bottle of red wine have in common with every organization described in this book.Anatomia Defectus is essential reading for international managers, investors, and consultants operating in or with the MENA region; for business professionals in the region who have spent careers navigating these patterns without a framework to understanding them; and for any serious student of organizational behavior who wants a perspective that the existing literature has never provided.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H7YVW29P
• ISBN13: 9798185988176
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"