Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. CarrollMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This probably only pertains to people who run a business with a team of at least, say, 10 people. At the end of the day most of the issues pertain to deals, mergers, rollups, and consensus building within the company.
I did like the proposed solutions. Basically for pretty much every failure, there were likely people who saw it coming, but it's extremely difficult to have a legitimate open dialog, or method of getting honest feedback from people. Most people are worried about their job, or what the CEO thinks, and even so-called open forums are usually not serious. If the CEO says "I have a great idea, but let's see if anyone has a problem with it", then obviously the employees will keep quiet. Likewise, someone might bring up a good dissenting point, but then the CEO will say "Thank you for that" without any follow-up.
So the difficulty lies in creating a real devil's advocate with real power. There are some good examples of this here.
Also, if I set up a new business soon, it might be a consultancy that is paid to find reasons NOT to proceed with a new deal/project/merger/etc. Except, of course, no one would want to hire me. As it mentions in the book, by the time due diligence is called for, the CEOs and managers are just looking for reasons to proceed, not to stop.
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