Very
few successful companies stay successful year after year - just about every
last one tumbles dramatically over time, and in many cases they completely
disappear a mere 25 or 50 years later.
An influential professor at the Goizueta Business School at Emory has taken a
look and come up with some interesting observations. I am not a big fan of
so-called “business books” - as a rule, I find them too simple, too generic,
too gimmicky. But every now and then a
business book strikes my fancy. Dr. Jagdish N. Sheth’s book, The
Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies, is one of them. It takes a
hard look at the causes for company failure, particularly where the company was
at one point the epitome of success. The book is both interesting and useful.
First of all, because this is not speculation - these companies were at the
pinnacle of success and failed.