If you’ve read When Growth Stalls, you understand the internal dynamics that tend to keep struggling companies down: Lack of consensus among the management team, loss of focus in the marketplace, loss of nerve (usually evidenced by how a company invests–or refrains from investing–its resources), and inconsistency.

I long ago ceased to be amazed when I saw struggling companies dealing with two, three, or even all four of these issues, as they tend to feed off one another. What still amazes me, however, is when more than one of these destructive dynamics rears its head within a single, 750-word newspaper story.

The Wall Street Journal’s October 12 column about Carrefour, the world’s second largest retailer, is a case in point. The Journal’s Ellen Byron and Christina Passariello interviewed new Carrefour CEO Lars Olofsson about the current state of affairs at the company, and published selected excerpts. Here are a few of my own excerpts from his answers (emphasis added):

“If Carrefour had some difficulties in the last 10 years or so, it is because they lost focus on the consumer.”

“Carrefour wasn’t consistent in the execution of its strategy.”

“There has been this ambiguity between going for the bottom line or for the top line, and that means the whole organization hasn’t been aligned in one clear direction.”

Three-for-four in less than a thousand words is pretty amazing, and I suspect if they would have published the full interview evidence of a loss of nerve would have also been apparent. After all, Carrefour brought Olofsson into the stumbling company in January, presenting him with (as the Journal put it) “one of the most difficult assignments in the industry.”

Carrefour has some 15,000 stores around the world and a leadership team that is second to none. But no company is exempt from the forces that plague management when growth stalls–not Olofsson’s, not mine, and not yours. The key is to stare them down and fight them off. As you do, you can get back to business.