Coca-Cola Director on How to Fail in Business By Trying Really Hard (at The Wall Street Journal...

Look at a list of stock tickers. You’ll find a pretty decent group of companies that were once heroes and now are, according to the cliche, zeroes. (General Motors, anyone?) Don Keough, the former president of Coca-Cola and current chairman of investment bank Allen & Co., just wrote a handy book about how other companies can achieve such feats of disappointment. Keough’s book, The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, takes a slightly opposite tack from most business books, which provide prescriptions for success. Keough, instead, decided to dramatize the alternative: how to screw up. (Remember: he saw New Coke.) His commandments: Quit taking risks; be inflexible; isolate yourself; assume infallibility; play the game close to the foul line; don’t take time to think; put all your faith in experts and outside consultants; love... [read full story]