When Good Companies Do Bad Things explores the strategic relationship between know-how, integrity, and integration, demonstrating how companies that fail to embrace the deeper meanings of these terms jeopardize their reputations and future prosperity. Schwartz and Gibb present new approaches to avoid the financial pitfalls of bad corporate assumptions and enable good companies to make good on translating social value into business value.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Covering the entire world of business from heavy industry to the financial houses of Wall Street, this book shines a spotlight on 100 of the most infamous cases of misconduct and malfeasance in corporate history. Corporations are in the business of making money. But when companies forget ethics, take operational shortcuts, or willingly endanger customers and the general public in their quest for profits, disasters of enormous magnitude can result. This book examines 100 of the worst cases of corporate greed and irresponsibility and poses the questions: Is it necessary or desirable to conduct business in this manner? Do the penalties and other punishments levied against these companies go far enough? And what is the government's responsibility for keeping corporate misdeeds in check? Coauthored by distinguished public policy experts, When Good Companies Go Bad: 100 Corporate Miscalculations and Misdeeds presents a representative sample of cases on a variety of topics, such as the financial sector, health care, environmental protection, product liability, and copyright. This broad introduction to the dark side of the corporate world focuses on events and scandals that resulted in substantial financial penalties, regulatory actions, or criminal convictions. The cases are presented in a readable and engaging format, making the book an illuminating and informative read for high school and college students as well as businesspeople, lawyers, journalists, and professors who teach American politics, public law, or public policy.

This is a revised edition of Revival of the Fittest published in Harvard Business Review's "OnPoint" feature in 2003. Sull (formerly at Harvard Business School; now at London Business School) emphasizes making/honoring/remaking commitments as an attribute behind great managers and businesses. He presents case examples, data on commitment life cycles and risks, and a Commitment Inventory. Annotation 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

How to prevent corporate scandals and fix good companies that do wrong The news media is replete with stories of corporate scandal, corruption and misdeeds. The need for effective crisis management and corporate governance strategies has never been greater. Broken Business explains why corporate scandals happen, what to do when scandals arise in your company, and how to prevent their future occurrence. Offering real-world anecdotes and solutions, this book details how corporations can mitigate the risk of scandal, reform corporate image and install structures to create a more ethical and profitable company. This insightful resource dispels common misconceptions of corporate misconduct and its causes through fascinating research into human nature, and compelling storytelling that demonstrates fundamental flaws in corporate culture. Author José Hernandez draws on decades of experience working with high-profile global corporations to present seven essential steps for transforming a company, including building a better culture, more effective compliance systems and re-focusing the strategy. This book allows you to: Examine current and highly publicized cases of corporate scandal and their impact on corporate credibility Employ practical methods to rehabilitate your corporation’s public image Implement managerial frameworks to quickly address cases of misconduct Promote a culture of compliance and integrity to encourage good conduct in your corporate environment At its core, this book is a simple, engaging “how to” guide that offers practical advice on institutionalizing integrity in any organization. Broken Business: Seven Steps to Reform Good Companies Gone Bad is an essential text for leaders seeking a concise review at how things can go wrong, how to deal with scandal fallout and how to ultimately become a better company.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?