Why businesses fail: Two books every entrepreneur or professional must read
March 29, 2021
The world has seen thousands of businesses collapse over the last few decades. From the dot.com bubble to the world financial crises, companies went belly up.
Ghana has not been left out of our own corporate failures. The recent financial sector clean up left 9 banks, 23 savings and loans, 347 microfinance institutions and 53 investment companies wiped off Ghana’s corporate list. How did that happen?
Many factors have played up here including false confidence, overly aggressive business growth, personal greed, ethical breakdowns, self-aggrandizement, and maybe, politics have played a part.
These two books tell us real stories of how large companies came crashing down. Though both writers and the cases are outside of Africa, the principles are borderless. Yes, these corporate failures apply to us in Ghana and Africa too.
From endings of suicides, to imprisonments to abject despondency, you will learn a great deal. Once you pick them up you can’t put them down.
How they Blew it – CEOs and Entrepreneurs behind some of the world’s most catastrophic business failures
Authored by Jamie Oliver & Tony Goodwin
The book was published in 2010 and discusses corporate failures from the late nineties to the end of the first decade of the 2000s.
It features the likes of Dick Fuld (King Kong) in the days of LEHMAN BROTHERS and how the collapse unfolded at the onset of the world financial crises. If you want to add a movie, look for the title the Last Days of Lehman Brothers.
The case of Enron with the then CEO, Ken Lay and the World Com story with Bennie Ebbers have been featured in detail.
How the mighty fall (and why some companies never give in)
Authored by Jim Collins
In narrating how some giant companies have fallen, this book does not only narrate the inside stories of how these big wigs collapsed. It takes time to build the theory of the ‘company collapse’ journey and how businesses tread on that path to their extinction.
This is where readers should be able to interpret and relate to their own businesses or companies they work for.
Ghana Talks Business has started speaking to individuals who were at the thick of affairs in Ghana’s company collapses and we would present some of the inside stories to readers in due time.
Jim Collins wrote the best selling business book ‘Good to Great’, which is also a must read.
Get these books and read, until Ghana gets its own version of ‘How they Blew It’ or ‘How the Mighty Fall’
