Success Videos - Why Smart Executives Fail

How could Wang Labs ignore the personal computer? Why did Enron think it could deceive the investment world by attempting to fire a financial journalist? How could Motorola lead in analog phones and ignore digital phones? These “worst practices” are the issues addressed in Dartmouth Professor Sidney Finkelstein’s book Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes. The video below gives a remarkable glimpse into Finkelstein’s findings, the main one of which is this: top executives are not failures, not stupid, not unmotivated. They are the best and the brightest. They and their organizations fall into many of the traps we all fall into personally: wrong assumptions, communication issues, delusions arising out of current successes, and various ego pathologies. Fascinating to watch:






Techtags: Enron Motorola Nokia Tycho Management Failure Best Practices