What you just read is a money quote from Donald Keough’s recently published, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR BUSINESS FAILURE. For years Keough, a former long-time Coca-Cola executive, has been flipping the script by giving presentations on How to Fail in Business. Keough rightly reasons, by learning why companies fail, we can learn what NOT TO DO in order to achieve business success. Now these fail-trap lessons on business failure are available for us to read and learn from.
Keough, like his good friend Warren Buffet, is a smart businessman who doesn’t try to overcomplicate business theory and uses plain everyday language to share smart advice. Thus, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR BUSINESS FAILURE appeals to big business execs, small business owners, and aspiring entrepreneurs.
I was hooked early on when reading the first commandment leading to business failure: QUIT TAKING RISKS. Keough writes...
“Over time, many, many successful companies have failed to take important risks at critical points, and they have paid a price. Some have merely stumbled and found later redemption, but quite a few have not only fallen but disappeared. In the 1980s alone, 230 companies disappeared from the FORTUNE 500. In fact, only 16 of the 100 largest companies that were around in the early 1900s are still with us.”
To support this commandment, Keough gives us a history lesson by retelling classic failure stories from Xerox and Coca-Cola as well as mixing in new lessons in failure such as this one about Apple …
“In business, you can make a good argument for mistakes like Steve Job’s Lisa or Power MacCube because the highly creative Apple environment that spawned them also produced big winners like iPod and iPhone.”“As Peter Drucker pointed out nearly fifty years agao, it is management’s major task to prudently risk a company’s present assets in order to ensure its future existence. In fact, if a company never has a failure, I submit that their management is probably not discontented enough to justify their salaries.”
Go ahead, chew on that last line cause its worth thinking about “… if a company never has a failure, I submit that their management is probably not discontented enough to justify their salaries.”
Discontent is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I forget that it doesn't only have a pejorative sense, so I've often forgotten what that niggling feeling is. It's discontent.
No matter how much I write, there's always more to be done. Halfway through my first book, I put together a smaller, faster one, so my first book was really my second book, and now that my first-started/second-finished book is done, three more *have* to be cared for. And my classes, despite great reviews, keep getting tweaked and adjusted.
More and more, I find myself tracking down managers and owners when I really love what a business is doing, and sharing bits of how they could make it even more perfect. (So far I haven't been thrown out of anyplace.)
Sure; I enjoy what I have and what I'm doing, but it could always be better. At the same time, I'm not waiting for 'better' to be happy, in fact, I'm quite content.
So apparently I'm content, and discontent. What was it someone said about entertaining two opposing thoughts at the same time?
Posted by: Joel D Canfield | August 02, 2008 at 11:24 AM
Business Failure Commandments is Very useful information.
Posted by: xocai | August 13, 2008 at 02:06 PM