Faulkner HR Solutions Founder Publishes Designed to Fail, a Workplace Systems Book That Challenges How Employers Diagnose Organizational Problems

New book argues the recurring failures employers blame on people were designed upstream by weak systems, unclear authority, and leadership decisions that were never built to survive pressure.

San Antonio, Texas - June 29, 2026

Dr. Thomas W. Faulkner, principal consultant of Faulkner HR Solutions, has published Designed to Fail: How Organizations Build Weak Managers, Lose Good Employees, and Call It a People Problem, a business and workplace systems book that challenges employers to stop treating recurring organizational failures as personnel problems and start examining the conditions, processes, and decisions that produce them.

The book argues that most persistent workplace problems, including high turnover, supervisor breakdown, documentation failures, compliance exposure, performance disputes, and employee relations crises, are not random. They follow patterns. And those patterns, Faulkner writes, are usually traceable to decisions the organization made long before the employee involved ever showed up.

Designed to Fail covers the full employer operating system: business strategy, finance and budgeting, operations, hiring, compensation, onboarding, training and development, supervisor effectiveness, performance management, employee relations, compliance, documentation, culture, HR systems and technology, growth and scaling, change management, customer experience, risk management, and separation and offboarding. Each domain is examined as a potential source of failure, not a backdrop to it.

The book is written for employers, business owners, executives, HR leaders, supervisors, nonprofit leaders, and public-sector administrators who are responsible for workforce performance, risk, retention, and organizational stability. Its central argument is practical: recurring workplace problems are system signals, not personality verdicts. When employers learn to read them that way, the cost of managing those problems goes down.

The book does not dismiss individual accountability. Its position is more specific: accountability weakens when organizations skip the step of examining the conditions, authority gaps, incentives, documentation habits, and leadership decisions that shape behavior before blame is assigned. Firing people is easier to execute than auditing a system. It is also far less likely to change the outcome.

Dr. Faulkner brings more than 15 years of experience across municipal government, behavioral health, nonprofits, and private industry to the book. He serves as Principal Consultant for Faulkner HR Solutions and is a U.S. Army veteran with a Doctor of Business Administration and credentials as a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB). His consulting work through Faulkner HR Solutions focuses on helping organizations diagnose and repair the workforce systems behind their most persistent operational problems.

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