The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

[Ballinvarosig Investors]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/

Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.

 

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common.  Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.

 

These traits can be found in the leaders of current failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs (cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN).  Here are the habits, as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:

 

There is more.

[tengen]

Interesting read but pretty debatable on some points. Steve Jobs, who one might argue had all seven habits, was famous for his "reality distortion field" that allowed him to ignore obstacles and convince his team to "do the impossible". On the other hand, perhaps Jobs was the exception that proves the rule as it's hard to believe another person could come along behaving the same way and have the same spectacular success.