The Ten Commandments for Business Failure

by Donald R. Keough

Book Overview

Don Keough --a former top executive at Coca-Cola and now chairman of the elite investment banking firm Allen & Company--has witnessed plenty of failures in his sixty-year career (including New Coke).... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591842344
• ISBN13: 9781591842347
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Portfolio
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A Must-read for corner executives

Unlike Peter and Waterman's "In Search of Excellence" and Collins' "Good to Great", Keough does not tell corner executives how to map out any strategic directions to achieve business success for their firms. Through more than six decades of business experience, he suggests 10 common blunders that corner executives are used to make and such blunders can take their firms to business failure. According to Keough, corner executives who aspire to fail tend to avoid taking risks and be afraid of staying in terra incognito, Due to their high level inflexibility and self-complacency, they love taking things for granted, never admit mistakes, and send mixed messages to their people beneath him/her. Moreover, they are great fans of bureaucratic fog and always hire external and experts to make every major decision. Without any passion for work and life, they demand for short term results by breaking the line of ethical behavior. In this book, Keough seldom adopts management theories to sustain his arguments but an array of business anecdotes is demonstrated to comment about such common blunders made by corners executives from giant firms such as Coca-Cola, Xerox, Kmart, IBM, Republic Steel, Montgomery Ward, and Ford. Keough also concludes that such financial scandals as Enron and sub-prime hurricane can be avoided if corner executives do not fall into one or more of the blunder traps. Warren Buffet has praised Keough as Mr. Coke because he has made a significant contribution to business growth of Coca-Cola Company before his retirement. This book can be a must-read for corner executives who are eager to avoid making such blunders when the going still gets good.

Recommended Fast Read

Warren Buffett said he admires Don Keough and recommended reading anything he writes. When this book was published, I followed his advice and read it. I was not disappointed. This was a quick read that left me wanting more material from Don Keough.

Another manager's perspective, but entertaining angle

Anyone reading Donald Keough's book would do well to first review books like How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business and The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers just to keep things in perspective. Both of these authors explain why would should temper "expert opinion" even when it's presented as entertainingly as in Keough's book. As someone who has been reading case studies and "the world as I see it" books by top executives for years, I find that many of the examples Keough lists are very familiar. Of course, the New Coke example has been around since I was in business school but, since he was there, Keough gets a special "insider's" pass and does provide some useful new insight. The other cases are also a little worn, but I don't think I've every been this entertained reading those cases. The Ten Commandments themselves are also individually familiar. Does an exhortation to keep one's passion and to remember to take risks really ring that profound? No, but, come to think of it, I haven't found them all in one place nor do I think I found them as engaging as you will find in this book. Keough will also get extra credit for a convincing appeal to authority. Authors which much more mediocre careers have written books with similar observations but Keough comes off as knowing what he is talking about - and still manages some self-deprecating humor. This was a quick and delightful read and I found myself laughing out loud, pointing out paragraphs in the book to my friends, and email quotes from the book. I plan to anonymously deliver this book to a couple of people who need it most (they may not get the joke, but I will).

Straight talk from a principled, no-nonsense, and street-smart former CEO

One of the fantasy dinners I occasionally think about would include several CEOs and one of them would definitely be Donald Keough. I tracked his career at Coca-Cola and then his association with Allen & Company as its chairman of the board. Regrettably, I never had the chance to meet him (much less dine with him) but was not surprised by the intelligence and sensitivity as well as circumspection that are revealed in his book. Keough is principled but he also possesses what Ernest Hemingway once characterized as "a built-in, shock-proof crap detector." He confirms a suspicion I have had for years: there are many different paths to business success but all business failures share common causes. Keough discusses ten of them, identifying each (with tongue somewhat in cheek) as a "commandment." He candidly acknowledges that throughout his career, he has broken (or at least bent) several of them when making a bad or at least ill-advised decision, notably the one he and former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta made involving New Coke. He draws heavily upon his years at that company (1981-1993), citing real-world examples of business failure at a wide variety of companies, some of them otherwise quite successful and highly reputable. No good purpose would be served if I merely listed the ten "commandments." Keough devotes a separate chapter to each and his insights are best revealed in context. However, I will provide a representative selection of brief excerpts to indicate the thrust and flavor of Keough's narrative, adding a comment or two of my own. Excerpt: "A company doesn't fail to do anything. Individuals do, and when you probe a bit you usually find that failure lies not in a litany of strategic mistakes - though they may all be present in one form or another - but the real fault lies, as Shakespeare noted, in ourselves, the leaders of the business. Businesses are the product and the extension of the personal characteristics of its leaders - the lengthened shadows of the men and women who run them. (Pages 8-9) Excerpt: "As Peter Drucker pointed out nearly fifty years ago, 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. Xerox was not discontented in any way. They were very, very comfortable, and, as I've noted, when you're comfortable, the temptation to quit taking risks is so great, it'd almost irresistible. And failure is almost inevitable."(Page 23) Excerpt: "Charles Kettering, the great engineering genius who helped steer General Motors during its glory years, said `Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me.' It is instructive that during World War II, Winston Churchill created a special office whose sole duty was to bring him bad news. He wanted the unvarnished truth, no matter what it was...Isolation [from painful re