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The Ten Commandments for Business Failure | 
| Author: Donald R. Keough
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $10.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 7360
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 1591842344
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9781591842347
ASIN: 1591842344
Publication Date: July 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Product Description
Don Keougha former top executive at Coca-Cola and now chairman of the elite investment banking firm Allen & Companyhas witnessed plenty of failures in his sixty-year career (including New Coke). He has also been friends with some of the most successful people in business history, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Drucker.
Now this elder statesman reveals how great enterprises get into trouble. Even the smartest executives can fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. When that happens, more bad decisions are sure to follow.
This light-hearted how-not-to book includes anecdotes from Keoughs long career as well as other infamous failures. His commandments for failure include: Quit Taking Risks; Be Inflexible; Assume Infallibility; Put All Your Faith in Experts; Send Mixed Messages; and Be Afraid of the Future.
As he writes, After a lifetime in business Ive never been able to develop a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success. What I could do, however, was talk about how to lose. I guarantee that anyone who follows my formula will be a highly successful loser.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Wonderful. Get it, Read it, and Watch for these things in your company September 27, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a spectacular business book and I can't imagine that you (and everyone else) would wait another day before starting to read it. Donald R. Keough has had long business experience in running companies and investing in others. He has seen the ups and downs and in this delightfully written and concise book he provides ten things you can do to ensure business failure. They are (and even though I provide them here, you will want to read what he has to say about each of them):
1)Quit taking risks
2)Be inflexible
3)Isolate yourself
4)Assume infallibility
5)Play the game close to the foul line
6)Don't take time to think
7)Put all your faith in experts and outside consultants
8)Love your bureaucracy
9)Send mixed messages
10)Be afraid of the future
and a bonus commandment for failure
11)Lose your passion for work and for life
Keough illustrates each of these stories from his own experience, from well known business stories, from history, and using simple reason. He writes well and makes everything he says read naturally and seem so sensible. Because it is. Yet you and I know and have seen people break everyone of these commandments and the failure that inevitably follows. Of course, like the 10 commandments in the Bible, you can't break one. If you break one, you also break others. For example, committing adultery also involves lying, coveting, and usually dishonoring what your parents taught you. Here, infallibility usually includes inflexibility, bureaucracy, and lack of thought. Right? Just because this makes sense, don't assume you won't fall prey to them. These are the kinds of failings that creep up on you and you have to actively look for them forming in your business. If you wait for them to get to full bloom, you are already in big trouble.
Warren Buffett provides a few pages of introduction that also make sense.
Enjoy, learn, and keep this book handy. I keep it within easy reach.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
A Must-read for corner executives September 21, 2008
Unlike Peter and Waterman's "In Search of Excellence" and Collins' "Good to Great", Keough does not tell corner executives how to map out any strategic directions to achieve business success for their firms. Through more than six decades of business experience, he suggests 10 common blunders that corner executives are used to make and such blunders can take their firms to business failure.
According to Keough, corner executives who aspire to fail tend to avoid taking risks and be afraid of staying in terra incognito, Due to their high level inflexibility and self-complacency, they love taking things for granted, never admit mistakes, and send mixed messages to their people beneath him/her. Moreover, they are great fans of bureaucratic fog and always hire external and experts to make every major decision. Without any passion for work and life, they demand for short term results by breaking the line of ethical behavior.
In this book, Keough seldom adopts management theories to sustain his arguments but an array of business anecdotes is demonstrated to comment about such common blunders made by corners executives from giant firms such as Coca-Cola, Xerox, Kmart, IBM, Republic Steel, Montgomery Ward, and Ford. Keough also concludes that such financial scandals as Enron and sub-prime hurricane can be avoided if corner executives do not fall into one or more of the blunder traps.
Warren Buffet has praised Keough as Mr. Coke because he has made a significant contribution to business growth of Coca-Cola Company before his retirement. This book can be a must-read for corner executives who are eager to avoid making such blunders when the going still gets good.
Recommended Fast Read September 3, 2008
Warren Buffett said he admires Don Keough and recommended reading anything he writes. When this book was published, I followed his advice and read it. I was not disappointed. This was a quick read that left me wanting more material from Don Keough.
A great investment of time and money September 1, 2008
The title was provacative, so I looked at the front cover. Bill Gates and Jack Welch endorsed it and Warren Buffett wrote the Foreward. Thinking it would be hard to beat that threesome, I turned to the Foreward.
Waren Buffett himself writes that "when you are around Don, you are learning something all the time. He's an incredible business leader."
He also writes of a meeting of the very top leaders every few years, where each time Don Keough is asked to be the kynote speaker. Buffett writes that Bill Gates "just loves listening to him because Don talks such sense and offers such inspiration. Don can tell you to go to hell so wonderfully you'll enjoy the journey."
Thus, I bought the book hoping for three things: useful lessons on leadership and overall success, the opportunity to learn in general, and an enjoyable read.
Other reviews in Amazon regarding this book point to the many useful lessons for leaders, and how the book is so much better than others at illustrating these lessons with real-life cases. So many books by very senior executives are exercises in ego, or self-justification. In this book, Keough often shows where he went wrong -- but the point is that he readily recognized and admitted it, took the blame himself, and moved rapidly to the needed solution.
My favorite book on Leadership by someone outside of business, Leading Minds, by the renowned psychologist and education expert Howard Gardner, concludes after exhaustive research that exemplary leaders tell "stories of common aspiration."
Reading this book, one sees how Keough was such a great leader at Coca-Cola for decades -- he is a master storyteller, but it is not about him, it is about a team aspring and pulling together. Indeed, his legendary teamwork with two other humble but globally-renowned leaders, first roberto Goizueta and then Herbert Allen, show that he does put team before self. It would be such a privilege to be a fly on the wall when Keough and his great friend of almost 50 years, Buffett, swap stories - through parables they can make the important and the complex both clear and witty.
Regarding the opportunity to learn in general, this book is an easy read but it contains some profound and far from obvious nuggets. I guess it is because Keough studied humanities in college, which he attended on the GI bill after his service in World War II. He majored in philosophy, which he admits many in business scoff at as "useless knowledge."
This book reveals that Keough learned his lessons well, as philosophy and humanities in general can sharpen one's thinking and communicating skills. what could be more essential to a leader's success?
Reviewers often say this, without meaning it, but in this case Keough's depth and wit ensure that the quotations he provides are themselves worth the price of the book. Perhaps my favorite feature of the book is the comfortable way that Don Keough slips in philosophy, and his obvious love of and knowledge of literature. This book is one of the few written by someone so distinguished that is truly WRITTEN by the cited author. Keough writes with such an energy and personal quality that you know it is all from his fertile mind.
My third hurdle for a great investment of money, but more important in our harried world, time, concerns the enjoyment of reading.
This book is a noteworthy pleasure. So many books on leadership are trite or wooden. so many books by great leaders help you see why they did not become either writers or philosophers. In contrast, this book is one which you will not want to place down, even for dinner. Warren Buffett makes it clear that Don Keough is arguably the greatest keynote speaker in business, but sometimes witty and inspiring speakers cannot bring that off on the written page. Without the benefits of body language, facial expression, tone of voice, physical proximity, etc. it is much harder to be witty in a book.
Keough pulls it off, magnificently.
Finally, it is enjoyable to see the commandments in the negative, vs. the affirmative form. However, it is much more than enjoyble. This unique idea of Keough's makes the reader think more deeply about the commandment. For example, if someone says "take prudent risks", you my say "OK" and forget it. If someone illustrates, with witty applications and cases he has been an ultimate insider in, how NOT taking risks can lead you to fail, it helps lock it in your memory. The very act of thinking how and why not to do something, forces you to think more deeply than you would have about what to do, how to do it, and most important why to do it.
I would likely have read a list of ten things to do and said "Nice, I'll try to remember." Keough found a secret formula that makes me think about and actually remember the steps that can lead to success, by showing the failure caused by the alternative.
The bottom line is that this book is a great investment. I'd recommend it: for you, your employees, clients, or just people on your holiday list who you want to assure that you think have a love of learning and a good clean sense of humor.
 Fun but basic September 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I enjoyed the book. It's a quick easy read. It's also accurate in the sense that there is not much one can argue with (unlike many business books). But a large factor in my rating of a business book is in how many items I add to my todo list after finishing the book. I added none. I have decades of business experience yet I usually pickup a few actionable ideas from a book. I suspect the utility of this book is inversely proportional to your business experience so if you are just starting or have a few years the book could be very useful.
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