Why Companies Fail: The 10 Big Reasons Businesses Crumble, and How to Keep Yours Strong and Solid

WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, HealthSouth--why do companies fail? Ingebretsen offers 10 chapters with 10 reasons, from""growing too fast"" to""greed and arrogance,"" in a volume that reads like the business page headlines of the past two years. Recent corporate troubles exemplify the perils of ignoring Ingebretsen's maxims (e.g., AOL's sin of failing to understand that DSL, not cable, was the medium of the future, and Kmart's error in not addressing the rise of Target and WalMart). Ingebretsen's post-mortems are well-written and often incisive, but everyone has 20/20 hindsight--the trick is to spot failures before they occur. TheStreet.com columnist could have taken a different, and more useful, tack by picking companies that had tood the test of time and identifying the 10 factors that led to such longevity. Showing how firms could have avoided--or, more realistically, weathered--a crisis is of more benefit to managers than a laundry list of cautionary tales. Ingebretsen does give a few sections that address successful crisis management, such as Johnson & Johnson's treatment of the Tylenol-cyanide debacle, and NASDAQ's handling of improper profit charges. His audience, however, is the CEO of a large corporation, not the small business owner (who has quite real, but different difficulties staying afloat) or the line worker in a small company, who may recognize a problem, but whose opinion is less likely to count.