For all those who would presume to manage a human enterprise, there are two ways of succeeding: One is to get lucky. The other is to avoid failing.
It may seem perverse, but there are also two ways of failing:
One is to follow one’s peers lemming-like down the slippery slope of mediocrity.
The other is to be oblivious to what part of the problem you are.
What is common to all situations is not the likelihood of success, but the likelihood of failure. The everyday rate of any real success on the part of managers and executives seems to bear no correlation to the exponential flood of advice about “how to succeed.”
This little book of recipes about how to fail as a manager or executive turns that flood of advice about how to succeed on its head. The indispensable factor is not a list of explanations about how somebody succeeded. The indispensable factor is simply that of avoiding failure – avoiding the kind of thinking and actions that make failure likely.
How Executives Fail: 26 Surefire Recipes for Failing as an Executive is the only instruction book you’ll ever need about how to avoid failing by default. You’ll learn how to fail on purpose, with dash and aplomb. You’ll meet many familiar people – people you will immediately recognize – in these pages. Here and there, you might catch a glimpse of yourself.