The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [5]
But companies are artificial constructs. A company doesn’t fail to do anything. Individuals do, and when you probe a bit you usually find that failure lies not in a litany of strategic mistakes—though they all may be present in one form or another—but the real fault lies, as Shakespeare noted, in ourselves, the leaders of the business. Businesses are the product and extension of the personal characteristics of its leaders—the lengthened shadows of the men and women who run them. They are the main actors on the business stage and when, through one or more personal failings, they take a business in the wrong direction, then the business is headed for failure.
While these commandments can be applied to any business at any stage in its development, they are mainly intended for businesses and business leaders who have already attained a measure of success. In fact, the more you have achieved, the more these commandments apply to you. If you are the leader of an enterprise, large or small, that is achieving great sales and profits, be careful. That is the time you are in danger of grasping one of my commandments and failure is just around the corner.
These rules for failure are certainly not an indictment of anyone in particular, though some individuals are mentioned as examples. Nor are the commandments startling breakthroughs in management thinking. They just make common sense.
Show me a failed business, even one based on the latest wikinomics, and I will bet you with considerable assurance that their leaders have violated more than one of these commandments. One step toward failure, unchecked, leads to another.
So view this little book as a cautionary tale. If you find yourself a disciple of one or more of these commandments, watch out. You are on your way to failure and taking your company with you.
Commandment One—Top of the List
Quit Taking Risks
“He that is overcautious will accomplish little.”
—Friedrich von Schiller
FOR MOST OF MANKIND FOR most of history risk aversion was the prevailing mood. Hunters and gatherers wandered far and wide, we presume, but after the agricultural revolution allowed people to settle down, most of them did so. People chose to live as their fathers and mothers and their grandfathers and grandmothers before them had lived, never venturing far from the village. And with good reason. It was a dangerous world out there. Just look at the old maritime maps with their ominous areas labeled “terra incognito”—territory unknown—sometimes embellished with even more threatening warnings, such as “Here be dragons.” Who would want to take a risk sailing into such places?
A few did, of course. But most people stayed home. Many things could happen to you if you took a risk, and most of them were probably bad.
Even today, much of the world in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East, and parts of Southeast Asia is still mired in a risk-averse “Let’s-do-it-like-we-always-did-it-because-that’s-the-way-we-always-did-it” culture. The cycle of sameness is unbroken from generation unto generation, often in families and groups living in the deepest poverty.
America, on the other hand, has been from the very beginning about risk taking. From Columbus to Jamestown to the Second Continental Congress and Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent Declaration of Independence, this nation has been built on one risk after another. We are the descendants of tough, resilient risk takers who put everything, including their lives, on the line and survived almost insurmountable odds. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in 1782, “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world…. The American is a new man.”
My own great grandfather Michael Keough was only eighteen in 1848 when he left Ireland and all alone took the risk to cross the “bitter bowl of tears,” as the Atlantic was called.