The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [31]
In the field of mergers and acquisitions, multimillion even billion-dollar deals get under way and the momentum builds, the rivalries among the players come to the fore, the game—and a game it becomes—goes ahead, no holds barred. Someone is determined to win! They can taste it! All the cash lying on the table, all the supposedly solid rationale behind the deal, all the people involved—nothing matters except winning! “I want my way,” says the biggest ego in the room! There are dreams of being in the press conference spotlight and big headlines in the Wall Street Journal. It’s all too glamorous and we convince ourselves that the numbers do add up—even when they are about as sound as astrological predictions. The “animal spirits” that John Maynard Keynes wrote of are more powerful than most businesspeople would like to admit.
Look at the recent dreadful fits—Daimler and Chrysler, Time Warner and AOL, Kmart and Sears, Quaker Oats and Snapple. Should these really have ever happened? The less than satisfactory results were wholly predictable, but people were swept up in the deal, and no one, top to bottom, thought through the consequences or the consequences of the consequences. Certainly, the short-term gain to various players is always going to be a factor, but there must be someone projecting ahead to the long-term consequences for the welfare and dignity of all the stakeholders in every business activity.
Unless somebody stops to think… it’s easy to make the same mistakes over and over. And that is a sure prescription for failure. When there is a failure of some kind, begin looking around to assign blame or make excuses or punish somebody. That way you won’t step back to take the time to really analyze the failure. Good hospitals regularly convene morbidity and mortality sessions to discuss and learn from their own failures. Their cases involve life and death. Most businesses are not dealing with anything nearly so serious. But every mistake provides a real opportunity to think about a less than successful technical change or a marketing faux pas and figure out, as objectively as possible, what went wrong.
Any management that is really doing its job is going to stumble from time to time. But if you want to fail, avoid looking closely at each mistake and don’t analyze it. That way you will continue to make the same kind of mistake in the future.
If you still are determined to fail, however, it’s imperative that you don’t take time to think. Or, and this is really seductive, you can actually avoid almost all responsibility by getting someone else to do your thinking for you. This brings us to…
Commandment Seven
Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
—James Thurber
IN MY TEENS, while working during the summer at the Sioux City stockyards, I became acquainted with a number of cattle buyers and sellers. One day one of them asked me to help him by becoming a bull buyer. Bulls were shipped in one at a time and were scattered across the complex. When bulls outlived their reproductive usefulness, they were sold for slaughter. But for most buyers it wasn’t profitable to spend the time needed to wander all over the yards in order to buy one bull here and one bull there. However, an energetic summer student willing to go around and purchase fifteen or twenty bulls a day to fill a railcar could earn a fairly tidy commission, like twenty dollars or so.
I became a summer bull buyer for Doyle Harmon, the uncle of the famous Michigan football player Tommy Harmon. After my first day on the job, he came by and asked to see what I’d bought. It turned out I’d paid too much for quite a few of the bulls. Harmon reminded me that I was among salesmen and because of my young age, they would