Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes: Sydney Finkelstein
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Is there a more timely topic for a business book than brilliant executives running their companies into the ground? Dartmouth business professor Finkelstein has been on the case for six years, researching how otherwise intelligent people can manage to botch things up. Here, he dredges up old corporate screwups (like R. J. Reynolds’s smokeless cigarettes) and new ones, too (WorldCom and Tyco, among others). There’s a certain amount of schadenfreude involved, as the author crisply and incisively picks apart disaster after disaster, but the lessons drawn from this lengthy study are, for the most part, vastly unsurprising. While each company profiled tends to fail in its own way, there are common traits among top execs, such as a propensity to eliminate “anyone who isn’t 100 percent behind them” and to “underestimate major obstacles.” While Finkelstein suggests avoiding such destructive behaviors, the truth is, sometimes it’s human nature to be blind to one’s own weaknesses. And that’s a mystery no book can fully deconstruct.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
A landmark book, certain to become a classic. — Warren Bennis
If you think you know what’s bringing down the leaders of the corporate world, think again. — Alan Hassenfeld, Chairman and CEO, Hasbro Inc.
Richly detailed storytelling and analysis. — Fortune