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Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes
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Sales rank 375,134
Customers rating (based on 32 reviews)
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A definitive study of executive failures-why they happen and how to prevent them. There's a scenario that keeps repeating itself in today's business climate. A company is voted one of the most admired in the world. Then three or four years later, it's in dire financial trouble. A CEO is celebrated on the covers of BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Fortune. Soon after, the company is in the midst of a disastrous merger or some other fiasco. What goes wrong in these cases? Usually it seems that the top management made some incredibly stupid mistake. But the people responsible are almost always remarkably intelligent and usually have terrific track records. Even more puzzling than the fact that brilliant managers can make bad mistakes is the way they so often magnify the damage. Once a company has made a bad misstep, it often seems as though it can't do anything right. How does this happen? Instead of rectifying their mistakes, why do business leaders regularly make them worse? To answer these questions, Sydney Finkelstein has carried out the largest research program ever devoted to business breakdowns. In Why Smart Executives Fail, he uncovers-with startling clarity and unassailable documentation-the causes regularly responsible for major business breakdowns. Why Smart Executives Fail relates the stories of great business disasters and demonstrates that there are specific, identifiable ways in which many businesses regularly make themselves vulnerable to failure. The result is a truly indispensable, practical, must-read book that explains the mechanics of executive breakdowns, how to avoid them, and what to do about them if they happen.
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| Publisher | Portfolio Hardcover | | Release date | 06/2003 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
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 Great for leadership training
Fascinating stories and very entertaining. Good for leadership training and mindset. The case study perspective flows very well.
 Great for Research
I am working on a manuscript for a book that explores an array of mismanagement practices and attempts to highlight the mistakes that managers make that result in such problems. I purchased this book as one of my many resources to support views that I will express in my writing. I find the book to be very good, its content still holds true and it is on a subject that needs more study.
Jack Risewick
very readable (mostly)
This was an excellent set of case studies and I felt the author mostly kept it readable - though on some occasions, it got a bit slow/boring. But certainly a good read for those of us who try to understand the pitfalls of power. I particularly enjoyed the section on "7 habits of highly unsuccessful people".
Solid reporting on the most colossal business failures in history
In Why Smart Executives Fail, Finkelstein has assembled a collection of the largest failures in business history over the last 20 years. Through interviews with current and former chief executives from companies like Motorola, J&J and Samsung, he paints a picture of the critical mistakes organizations make in management and makes recommendation of how they could have avoid these disasters. In addition to great source material, Finkelstein's style is succinct and highly readable.
 Excellent white paper hidden in a 250-page book
There is much to praise in Finkelstein's book. Particularly effective are the stories he tells about executive or organizational hubris, the detailed case studies of slow-motion disasters that in hindsight seem unthinkable, but at the time convinced thousands (or hundreds of thousands, if you count investors and analysts) as steadiness of vision and strategy.
Less useful is the book's attempts to apply a version of scientific inquiry to those case studies in order to generate a series of rules (or at least probabilities and their corollaries). The bottom lines are, or should have been: don't assume that a history of success grants you the right to dictate the future, don't ignore front-line or market feedback, and don't assume that your IQ automatically translates into business success. Rather than stating these points, Finkelstein works a little too hard to turn each of his observations into actionable essays. That starts a cycle of repetitions and rather bland generalizations that doesn't help his reader become more effective.
Sticking to the basic stories is what works best in this book, and Finkelstein's writing, interviews and on-the-spot analysis is a strength.
Finally, having just been through a stretch in my own company where a group of highly educated and intelligent executives parachuted in from their former senior-level roles at a major global consultancy, and then proceeded to fumble and bumble and nearly destroy the organization with a 24-month string of almost laughably bad bright ideas, I kept thinking of Finkelstein's title. While those now ex-colleagues are enoying their severance checks, I hope they'll consent to being interviewed for Finkelstein's next edition.
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